The AI program that can tell whether you may go blind

Dr Ramasamy Kim is looking at the inside of an eyeball. There is nothing particularly surprising about that: he is head of retina services at an eye hospital in southern India. The image on his computer screen shows the first blush of a condition linked to diabetes that affects millions of Indians – and can lead to blindness. The diagnosis was made not by him, or any other doctor, but by an algorithm. Over the past five years, Kim and his team at the Aravind eye hospital in Madurai have examined about 15,000 images from across the country showing the interior surface of the eyeball, known as the fundus.