Alphabet's Verily and Google found a potential new test for heart disease using AI

New research from Alphabet's life science company, Verily, and Google shows that one day there might be a far easier test to determine risk of heart disease. Researchers were able to find new indicators of heart disease risk present in pictures of retinas by analyzing them with artificial intelligence, according to a paper published Thursday by researchers at Google and Verily, which has not been peer reviewed. Doctors today rely heavily on blood tests to determine risk of heart disease; a potential test based on retinal images would be less invasive, easier to obtain, and faster to analyze with AI. While mainstream medicine has found a number of signals that indicate heart disease on retinal images, the Google and Verily algorithm was able to find indicators of age, gender, whether the patient smoked, blood pressure, and information about the level of sugar in a person's blood on its own. Then after analyzing how those traits influenced future cardiovascular attacks, Google claims the system nearly matched the accuracy of a standard test for estimating the risk of heart failure, the European SCORE system. That system uses data from a blood test.