New AI developed to spot eye diseases

An artificial intelligence (AI) system has identified eye diseases as accurately as experts has been developed by researchers.

A study undertaken in 2016 by teams at Moorfields Eye Hospital, DeepMind Health and University College London (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology described how machine learning technology has been trained to identify eye diseases and recommend how patients should be referred for care.

The AI technology can be applied to different types of eye scanners. It uses two types of mathematical systems to recognise features of eye diseases, having originally learnt to do so from complex OCT scans. It can then decide how to refer the patient based on the urgency of the identified conditions. The study concluded that the technology was correct 94% of the time.