DeepMind's new AI predicts kidney injury two days before it happens

In 2017, DeepMind started trialling a new app with the Royal Free hospital in London. Called Streams, it was intended to help clinicians identify and monitor acute kidney injury (AKI) – a condition linked to 100,000 deaths in the UK every year. But unlike most of DeepMind's headline-grabbing work, Streams doesn't contain a jot of artificial intelligence. Instead, the app brings together medical information, such as blood test results and vital signs, and notifies clinicians when a patient's kidney health deteriorates, using a well-established formula for evaluating kidney function. Now DeepMind has provided the first hints that using artificial intelligence might be a much better way of assessing whether someone is at risk of AKI.