Hospital shares patient scans with Google: Can they do that?

An eye hospital in London is entering the debate over patient privacy by sharing images of patients' retinas with a Google-owned artificial intelligence project. Moorfields Eye Hospital is anonymizing and then sharing patient information with DeepMind, a machine-learning AI company that plans to use the hospital's non-invasive retina scans to train its machines, which must scan thousands and thousands of images to "learn" how an eye should look. While patients consented to general research, privacy advocates have expressed concerns they may not have realized the extent to which their personal information – even scans of their eyes – would be handed over to an outside party such as Google. The hospital has taken an important first step by informing patients before the project begins, which is likely a lesson learned from a previous medical research project in Britain. In a previous data-sharing partnership between DeepMind and three other London hospitals, patients discovered the involvement of their data only haphazardly afterward, the BBC reported.