Google's AI looks deep into your eyes to diagnose disease

Every week, Moorfields Eye Hospital in London performs 3,000 optical coherence tomography scans to diagnose vision problems. The scans, which use scattered light to create high-resolution 3D images of the retina, produce large quantities of data, and its analysis is slow. Understanding the images requires trained and experienced human eyes to identify problems specific to each case, leaving little or no time to identify broader, population-wide trends that could make early detection easier. That's just the kind of task that artificial intelligence can be used to tackle, though. So it's perhaps not surprising that Google's AI wing, DeepMind, has decided to partner with the hospital to apply machine learning to the problem as part of its Health program.