Google's AI could detect heart diseases from retina scans

Have you ever wondered why doctors examine your eyes even when the ailment is seemingly somewhere else? One's eyes, or rather the retina, doctors say, can reveal a lot about your general well being. It turns out what doctors can, Google can do better. On Tuesday, Google published an official blog saying its deep learning algorithm can accurately predict a person's cardiovascular health by evaluating retinal images. In other words, Google's AI can tell if your heart is in a good state. The discovery was put forward by scientists Ryan Poplin, Avinash V. Varadarajan, Katy Blumer, Yun Liu, Michael V. McConnell, and Greg S. Corrado in a research paper titled'Prediction of cardiovascular risk factors from retinal fundus photographs via deep learning', published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.