UK – DeepMind and the National Health Service will work together on a new method to diagnose the two most common ocular problems, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The tech company dropped the news via an on-line post on its website on July 5, 2016.
DeepMind Technologies was first founded in September 2010 with the intention of creating an artificial intelligence that could learn how to play video games. In 2014, Google bought the company and renamed it Google DeepMind.
The addition of Google’s developing team put the company on the fast track to achieving its objective. The result was AlphaGo, a computer program that could play Go, which is a tough Asian board game. In October 2015, AlphaGo beat the European Go Champion, Fan Hui, five times in a row which is the first time an AI defeated a professional player. The news was made public in January 2016 along with a study on-line published in the Journal Nature.
In spite of what happens in Terminator 3, specialists around the world are working very hard to create an artificial intelligence that can learn like a human being, and AlphaGo proved it is possible.
The AI is going to study the physiology of the human eye
In cooperation with the NSH in England, the tech company is going to “teach” the AI all that there is to know about the human eye. The idea was conceived when Pearse Keane, specialists from Moorfields, got in touch with members of DeepMind to propose a working association.
“This collaboration came about when Pearse Keane, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields, contacted DeepMind to explore how we could work together on two specific conditions that cause sight loss: diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Together, these affect more than 625,000 people in the UK and over 100 million people worldwide,” reads the announcement at Google DeepMind’s website.
The objective is clear, creating a tool that helps professionals detect visual problems at an early stage. To do so, Moorfields, which is a specialized eye hospital funded by the NHS, will provide DeepMind staff with a huge database of anonymous eye digital scans. Then, using something the organization calls “machine learning,” the specialists will teach the AI how doctors diagnosed ocular diseases.
Research has shown that an early detection plays a crucial role in reducing the loss of visions in patients, especially the ones diagnosed with AMD. Most of them are 50 and with proper and timely treatment, their ability to see is usually preserved. However, the current detection methods are not quick enough to satisfy the overall demand, and as a result, there are around two million people with sight loss living in the United Kingdom, and the medical authorities expect the number to increase significantly by 2020. Even though DeepMind said their research could do nothing for patients in the short term, the company stated learning machines could provide a more practical solution in the future. It is important to understand the objective of the AI is not to replace human experts but to assist them.
A computer can accurately analyze information much faster than a person, which is perfect to diagnose problems leaving the specialists free to work on the solutions.
Source: DeepMind