The NHS is exploring whether Google's AI could help to save people's eyesight

NHS eye hospital Moorfields has announced it is working with DeepMind -- an artificial intelligence research lab acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million -- in a bid to identify people who are likely to lose their sight as a result of an eye disease. Through the medical research partnership, Moorfields will investigate whether DeepMind's AI technology can be used to help spot early signs of eye conditions that human eye care experts might miss. In order to determine whether DeepMind's AI technology is useful for diagnosing eye conditions, Moorfields is applying the company's algorithms to one million anonymous OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) scans. The aim is to determine whether the algorithms can learn to spot early signs of age-related macular degeneration and sight loss that occurs as a result of diabetes. Mustafa Suleyman, Google DeepMind cofounder and head of DeepMind Health, told Business Insider that he wants DeepMind's AI to understand the structure and nature of eye scans "well enough to be able to try to predict in advance which ones indicate that a patient may be at risk to a particular kind of eye disease." The algorithms that DeepMind builds are known as machine learning algorithms because they have the ability to learn through training without being explicitly programmed.