Google's AI Eye Doctor Gets Ready to Go to Work in India

Google is poised to begin a grand experiment in using machine learning to widen access to healthcare. If it is successful, it could see the company help protect millions of people with diabetes from an eye disease that leads to blindness. Last year researchers at the search and ads company announced that they had trained image recognition algorithms to detect signs of diabetes-related eye disease roughly as well as human experts. The software examines photos of a patient's retina to spot tiny aneurisms indicating the early stages of a condition called diabetic retinopathy, which causes blindness if untreated. At the 2017 WIRED Business Conference in New York City today, a leader of Google's project said that work has begun on integrating the technology into a chain of eye hospitals in India.