Now DeepMind's AI can spot eye disease just as well as your doctor

When Pearse Keane started using optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanners to peer to the back of a person's eye in Los Angeles a decade ago, the machines were relatively crude. "The devices were lower resolution, they had much slower image acquisition speeds," says Keane, a consultant ophthalmic surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital and researcher at University College, London. From 2007, Keane spent two years studying scans from OCT machines learning to diagnose eye conditions in patients and pick out the minute details which make up sight-threatening diseases. "It was very time consuming, laborious work," Keane says. OCT scans use light to quickly create high resolution, 3D images of the back of the eye.