How ophthalmology is pioneering the field of artificial intelligence

Well, I think AI is quite a broad term. The type of AI that has generated a lot of excitement in recent years is called'deep learning'. This is a process by which software programs learn to perform certain tasks by processing large quantities of data. Deep learning is what has made ophthalmology a pioneer in the field of implementing AI in medicine, because we are increasingly reliant on imaging tests to monitor our patients. Particularly in my subspecialty of interest, medical retina, imaging tests such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) are performed very frequently and have provided the material to train and test and then apply AI decision support systems.