Verily developing AI-based heart disease test

Verily and its sister company Google Research are developing an AI-powered test for heart disease that analyses retinal imagery. Verily is Google's standalone healthcare division, and has embarked on many collaborations since being spun out in 2015, and AI is emerging as one of the most exciting areas in digital health. The paper, which is yet to be peer reviewed, describes a technology that analyses imagery of the inner surface of the back of the eye to identify signs of heart disease. The system was originally trained using images from 284,335 heart disease patients, during which time it identified features specific to the disease through machine learning. The test was then validated using two independent datasets from 12,026 and 999 patients respectively. According to the authors of the paper, the system could accurately identify a number of heart disease-related risk factors, such as smoking status, HbA1c levels, blood pressure, and past major cardiac events as well as age and gender.