Eye eye! DeepMind teams up with doctors to ogle eyeballs for illness

AI can help ophthalmologists diagnose more than 50 common eye diseases from retinal scans, according to a paper published in Nature Medicine on Monday. Researchers from DeepMind, University College London (UCL), and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, have developed a system based on two neural networks that analyses 3D optical coherence tomography scans. First, a convolutional neural network processes the scanned image and converts it into a tissue map, detailing its anatomy and features. This is then fed into a second convolutional neural network that analyses the eye tissues in detail to diagnose diseases and recommend treatment plans, such as if the patient needs to be book a further appointment with an ophthalmologist or not. It can, apparently, recommend the right referral procedure with 94 per cent accuracy for over 50 diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, a common condition amongst the elderly.