Through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is driving a fundamental shift in the health technology sector.
Google's artificial intelligence (AI) can now forecast cardiovascular problems by examining eye scans, according to a recent announcement by Pichai.
This innovation has the potential to displace current diagnostic techniques like X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans.
A Window to Cardiovascular Health Through AI and the Eye- The retina of the eye, in particular, serves as a window into the health of the entire body.
Blood arteries that represent the health of the body as a whole are present in the fundus, the back internal wall of the eye.
Doctors are able to deduce key details about a person's look, such as their blood pressure, age, and smoking habits, all of which are significant indicators of their cardiovascular health.
Google and Verily's experts employed machine learning to examine a medical dataset of over 300,000 patients in order to develop their cardiovascular prediction system.
Along with general medical information, this data also included eye scans. Then, using neural networks to identify patterns, the metrics required to predict cardiovascular risks, such as age and blood pressure, were connected with tell-tale indicators in the eye scans.
In tests, Google's AI was 70% accurate in differentiating between the retinal scans of two patients—one who experienced a cardiovascular incident in the five years that followed and one who did not.
Despite requiring a blood test and producing accurate predictions 72% of the time, the SCORE technique of assessing cardiovascular risk performed just marginally worse.
This AI offers opportunities for early identification of diseases like dementia, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and schizophrenia. It can recognize health issues that even qualified specialists couldn't.
The retina of the eye, in particular, offers important clues about general health.