Retinal scan complete

Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence (AI) research subsidiary of Alphabet, has had considerable applications in the field of medicine and medical research through DeepMind Health. One of its more recent achievements is an eye-scanning AI algorithm that can detect one of the most common forms of blindness.

This algorithm uses the same machine learning technique that Google uses to categorize millions of web images. It searches retinal images and detects signs of diabetic retinopathy — a condition that results from damaged eye blood vessels, and leads to gradual loss of sight — like a highly trained ophthalmologist.

According to computer scientists at Google, and medical researchers from the U.S. and India, the algorithm was originally developed to analyze retinal images and wasn’t explicitly designed to identify features that might indicate diabetic retinopathy. It learned this on its own, after having been exposed to thousands of healthy and diseased eyes.

The algorithm was exposed to 128,000 retinal images classified by at least three ophthalmologists as a training data set. Its was then tested on 12,000 retinal images, where it successfully identified the disease and how severe it was, matching or even exceeding the performance of experts. The results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association — the first study in the journal ever published involving deep learning, according to editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner.