Bill Harvey: That’s what gets results

I noticed that a paper from the Moorfields/Google project was published over last weekend.

My first response from the general media reports was one of ‘here we go again.’ Statements such as ‘doctors harnessed machine learning – a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to training computers to become smart’ are always a little disappointing. We have been using machine learning for years. Any instrument that includes a database, such as your fields screener or OCT, includes data previously input from a range of patient results and allows the machine to flag up anything suspicious (such as the p values, total deviation or GHT on a field plot, or the colour coding on most OCT outputs) is using machine learning. There is no ‘intelligence’ here beyond data storage and identification of outliers within a set range.