Google's training AI to catch diabetic blindness before it's too late

Diabetes is no joke, regardless of what Wilford Brimley memes you've seen. The disease's associated foot ulcers can lead to amputation of the limb while diabetic retinopathy (DR) can rob people of their sight. Some 415 million diabetics worldwide are at risk of this visual affliction and many of those living with it in the developing world lack sufficient health care access to treat it. That's why Google is training its deep learning AI to spot DR before it becomes a problem -- and without the help of an on-site doctor. Since the disease is most readily diagnosed by examining a picture of the back of the eye, the Google team has spent the past few years developing a dataset of 128,000 individual images, each examined by 3-7 ophthalmologists from a panel of 54.