Google To Use AI To Diagnose Eye Ailments | TechTree.com

Google To Use AI To Diagnose Eye Ailments

DeepMind will look into the eyes of British citizens to warn patients about possible sight loss early

 

In what is seen as Google’s challenge to IBM’s much talked about cognitive system called Watson, the Internet Giant has tied up with a British hospital to teach computers the art of diagnosing eye disease.

Part of Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence business, the project would use learning techniques from analyzing massive data in order to create machine understanding of two specific eye conditions – age related degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, says an article published ITNews.com.

The idea is to use AI to detect these conditions early enough so that patients can be saved from going blind, the article said (Read it here). Currently, the doctors look for these signs through an examination of the interiors of the eye, either directly via an ophthalmoscope or through a non-invasive digital scan.

The Moorsfields Eye Hospital is providing results of a million such incidents of scanning in order to train DeepMind with the AI required to diagnose such instances in the future. The Royal National Institute of Blind people and some charities are supporting Google in this effort, a report published on BBC.com said (Read it here).

DeepMind, which opened its health division earlier this year, had started work on a mobile app to help doctors and nurses diagnose acute kidney injury. It may be recalled that researches at IBM have been teaching the Watson AI software on ways to diagnose certain types of cancer.

An area of concern in the past with such data sharing relates to privacy of patients. Under the latest agreement between DeepMind and the hospital, the data cannot be linked to any other dataset other than what it is meant to be. In fact, researchers are not even allowed to link successive scans from the same person.


TAGS: Google, Artificial Intelligence, DeepMind, eye disease

 
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