Artificial intelligence is one of those Tomorrow’s World phrases that has suddenly become everyday parlance.
The news this week from Moorfields that AI matched world-leading eye experts in picking up on a range of conditions by studying OCT scans shows just how far the technology has come and why it needs to be adopted, but are people ready?
Moorfields was working in conjunction with UCL and DeepMind Health, Google’s neuroscience-inspired agency that develops learning algorithms using neural networks to recognise patterns. It’s an accelerative process. Every scan taken adds to the accumulation of knowledge, the better the data, the better the outcomes. Machines are quick, accurate and don’t stop for coffee and, with 600,000 macular disease sufferers in the UK, speed is of the essence.
Since the Luddites, man has been fearful of technology, not because of what it can do but for what it may take away from them. Technology will change working practices in optometry and will be fundamental in bringing primary and secondary care closer together and that is already happening, look out for a new ophthalmology column in Optician coming later this month.
That convergence has long been promoted as a positive thing by optometry but optometry has failed to convince ophthalmology of its merits. AI may well just be the catalyst to bring it about.
Fears that this will create an eye care singularity that will reduce optometrists to mere drones is nonsense. It’s just change, and as Judy Lea describes in practice soft skills rule.
As the Luddites took up cudgels in the 1810s some must have thought the world was coming to an end. But it just changed. They went back home to Nottingham and built one of the greatest cities of the industrial age.