An Artificial Intelligence developed by Google and verily can now identify the risks of Cardio Vascular disease just by looking at the retina of a person. A study published recently in Nature Bio-Medical Engineering Journal showed that Artificial intelligence can predict the risks of cardiovascular diseases like a heart attack or stroke within 5 years is based on the photographs of the retina that Artificial intelligence read.
The eye has always been acting as a window to see our systemic diseases. Doctors spot medical conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, vitamin A deficiency etc. with a comprehensive dilated eye exam of the retina. The researchers at Google and verily trained the Artificial intelligence to learn the pattern from the retina photos and health data of 284, 335 people.
Known risk factors for cardiovascular disease include age, blood pressure, and gender, among other things. Based on an eye scan, the algorithm was able to predict a person’s age to within 3.26 years, smoking status with 71% accuracy, and blood pressure within 11 units of the upper number reported in their measurement.
Researchers involved in the study were also able to track which factors the algorithm was relying on to make its predictions since the system created heat maps of areas it focused on. In this case, the researchers know the system was paying particular attention to blood vessels to calculate blood pressure, for example.
Still, as promising as these results seem, they are preliminary, according to a blog post by Dr Michael McConnell, the Head of Cardiovascular Health Innovations at Verily.
