Heart disease kills 17 lakh people in India per year. That number is close to 2 crore for the rest of the world. If only there was a way to conclusively detect heart disease with increased accuracy?
Turns out, Google's new AI algorithms can do just that -- detect heart diseases in patients with increased accuracy -- just by looking at your eyes. No kidding.
Reuters
Through the power of machine learning, scientists from Google and Verily (which is part of Google's parent company, Alphabet, dedicated for life sciences research) have discovered a whole new way to know if a person is at risk of a heart disease.
They came up with this innovative method by analyzing scans of the back of a patient's eye. By analyzing images of the eye's retinal scan alone, Google's AI can accurately deduce several data points about the patient -- like age, blood pressure, whether or not they smoke, etc.
Google and Verily
These data points can then be crunched through AI to come up with a risk factor related to the health of anyone's heart. Whether or not they're at severe or low risk of a heart attack can be ascertained with the same accuracy as other current medical methods.
What's great about Google's AI-driven method to assess anyone's cardiac health is that it's quick and easy, and it doesn't require any blood test or invasive tests. A detailed paper on how the AI-driven method works to detect anyone's hearth health through their eyes was published earlier yesterday, and it's also been carried in the Nature?journal of?Biomedical Engineering.
REUTERS
While this is a promising new overlap of technology and healthcare, don't expect this procedure to be used inside hospitals or clinics just yet. Before this AI technique is used to detect heart health through retinal scans, Google wants to test and fine-tune it even more, so that its accuracy gets even better.
Yet another example of AI improving the quality of our lives!