A team from the University of Leeds believes this AI tool opens the door to a cheap and simple screening program for the world's No. 1 killer. Their tests find the computer can predict patients at risk of a heart attack in the next 12 months with up to 80% accuracy. The breakthrough adds to evidence that our eyes are not just "windows to the soul," but windows to overall health as well. "Cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks, are the leading cause of early death worldwide and the second-largest killer in the UK. This causes chronic ill-health and misery worldwide," project supervisor Professor Alex Frangi says in a university release.

A team from the University of Leeds believes this AI tool opens the door to a cheap and simple screening program for the world's number one killer. Their tests find the computer can predict patients at risk of a heart attack in the next 12 months with up to 80 percent accuracy. The breakthrough adds to evidence that our eyes are not just "windows to the soul," but windows to overall health as well. "Cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks, are the leading cause of early death worldwide and the second-largest killer in the UK. This causes chronic ill-health and misery worldwide," project supervisor Professor Alex Frangi says in a university release.

Artificial intelligence could detect early signs of heart disease during routine trips to an optician, a group of researchers has said. A study, led by Leeds University and published in Nature Machine Intelligence Tuesday, found that a new AI system that examined eye scans was about 70% accurate at predicting a heart attack within the next 12 months, according to the researchers. Currently, doctors estimate someone's risk of a heart attack in the next ten years using tools that take into account parameters such as age, gender, smoking history, cholesterol and blood pressure. The use of AI with eye scans could help determine more accurately the risk of someone having a heart attack, allowing heart disease treatment to be started earlier, the study authors said. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An artificial intelligence system is capable of spotting whether someone will have a heart attack within the next year -- through a routine eye scan. A team from the University of Leeds believes this AI tool opens the door to a cheap and simple screening program for the world's number one killer. Their tests find the computer can predict patients at risk of a heart attack in the next 12 months with up to 80 percent accuracy. The breakthrough adds to evidence that our eyes are not just "windows to the soul," but windows to overall health as well. "Cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks, are the leading cause of early death worldwide and the second-largest killer in the UK. This causes chronic ill-health and misery worldwide," project supervisor Professor Alex Frangi says in a university release.

Eye scans from 150,000 National Health Service (NHS) patients in the UK will be used to test commercial artificial intelligence tools that could be rolled out to spot the warning signs of diabetic sight loss. But researchers aim to avoid a repeat of previous NHS data-sharing scandals by ensuring that records are anonymised and that AI tests are only run on servers owned by NHS trusts.

Neurological conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's could be diagnosed from simple eye scans performed by high street opticians thanks to a new NHS artificial intelligence (AI) project. Newcastle University is working on the project with medics at North East hospitals as part of a national £50 million boost to use AI in a range of health schemes. Early diagnosis in progressive neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, which affect more than one million people in the UK, is important, so speeding up the process could be crucial. Anya Hurlbert, professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University, is leading the Octahedron project. She said: "The retina at the back of the eye is basically an outpost of the brain and the only part of the central nervous system we can see directly from the outside. "We know that in Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease the retina is affected." Very detailed images of the retina can be captured by optical coherence tomography, or OCT scanning, which is quick and cheap and increasingly available at high street opticians. Further analysis of these scans will now be developed with the use of AI, to recognise signs of neurological disease. Prof Hurlbert said: "The aim of the project is to use NHS data to teach computers how to detect early signs of neurological disease via retinal imaging.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has been on the rise in the diagnosis of medical imaging. A doctor can look at an X-ray or biopsy to identify abnormalities, but this can increasingly also be done by an AI system by means of "deep learning" (see'Background: what is deep learning' below). Such a system learns to arrive at a diagnosis on its own, and in some cases it does this just as well or better than experienced doctors. The two major differences compared to a human doctor are, first, that AI is often not transparent in how it's analyzing the images, and, second, that these systems are quite "lazy." AI looks at what is needed for a particular diagnosis, and then stops.

Google AI today shared that it's created a model for detecting an endangered species of orca whales in the Salish Sea, a waterway between the United States and Canada. Underwater microphones situated at a dozen points in the Salish Sea that includes the state of Washington and Vancouver Bay are used to alert officials when a Southern Resident killer whale is detected. Less than 100 of these whales are thought to still be alive, according to the Center for Whale Research. The orca detection model is the latest from Google, and it follows previous acoustic AI work to detect the sound of chainsaws in rainforests to stop illegal lumber operations and work last year with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. to help protect humpback whales. The orca model runs on a platform operated by the nonprofit Rainforest Connection.

"Eyes are the windows to the soul". It's probably many physicians' dreams to be able to tell what a patient has come down with by looking into their eyes. Researchers from the University College London (UCL) and Moorfields Eye Hospital are trying to realize this dream in a collaborative project called "AlzEye". By studying a database of eye scans which include details of patients' retina alongside with other vital health information, the research team hope to detect optical differences and see if they may be telltale signs of Alzheimer's disease. To facilitate the process, the team is engaging with Google DeepMind, to employ machine learning algorithms to go through scans and information of 300,000 patients aged 40 and above who had visited Moorfields between year 2008 and 2018.

THE DIFFERENT parts of a health-care system have different focuses. A hospital's dementia unit keeps records of patients' mental abilities. The stroke unit monitors blood flow in the brain. The cardiac unit is interested in that same flow, but through and from the heart. Each agglomeration of equipment and data is effective in its own domain, but for the most part has little relevance to other bits of the body and the conditions that plague them.