THE BOOKS strewn around Pearse Keane's office at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London are an unusual selection for a medic. "The Information", a 500-page doorstop by James Gleick on the mathematical roots of computer science, sits next to Neal Stephenson's even heftier "Cryptonomicon", an alt-history novel full of cryptography and prime numbers. Nearby is "The Player of Games" by the late Iain M. Banks, whose sci-fi novels describe a utopian civilisation in which AI has abolished work. Dr Keane is an ophthalmologist by training. But "if I could have taken a year or two from my medical training to do a computer-science degree, I would have," he says.

Artificial intelligence can diagnose eye disease as accurately as some leading experts, research suggests. A study by Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and the Google company DeepMind found that a machine could learn to read complex eye scans and detect more than 50 eye conditions. Doctors hope artificial intelligence could soon play a major role in helping to identify patients who need urgent treatment. They hope it will also reduce delays. A team at DeepMind, based in London, created an algorithm, or mathematical set of rules, to enable a computer to analyse optical coherence tomography (OCT), a high resolution 3D scan of the back of the eye.