Google AI now can predict cardiovascular problems from retinal scans

Google AI has made a breakthrough: successfully predicting cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks and strokes simply from images of the retina, with no blood draws or other tests necessary. This is a big step forward scientifically, Google AI officials said, because it is not imitating an existing diagnostic but rather using machine learning to uncover a surprising new way to predict these problems. What's more, the new system shows what parts of the eye image lead to successful predictions, giving researchers new leads into what causes cardiovascular disease. The results of the Google AI research have been published in an article entitled "Prediction of Cardiovascular Risk Factors from Retinal Fundus Photographs via Deep Learning" in Nature Biomedical Engineering. "Using deep learning algorithms trained on data from 284,335 patients, we were able to predict CV risk factors from retinal images with surprisingly high accuracy for patients from two independent data sets of 12,026 and 999 patients," Lily Peng, MD, product manager and a lead on these efforts within Google AI, wrote in the Google AI official blog.