DeepMind partners with NHS eye hospital to conduct AI research

Google-owned DeepMind has expanded its collaboration with the UK's National Health Service (NHS), announcing a research partnership today with Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London -- its second publicly confirmed foray into working with the NHS. But this time the project is being explicitly badged as medical research, and DeepMind will be applying AI machine learning algorithms to the data -- so that's also a first. Although the company has been public about its ambitions to apply AI to health data before now. The Moorfields partnership is focused on two specific sight-loss causing conditions: diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which DeepMind notes collectively affect more than 625,000 people in the UK and more than 100 million people worldwide. The stated aim is to investigate whether machine learning algorithms can automate the analysis of the digital eye scans that are typically used to diagnose the two conditions.