Author: Tristan Greene / Source: The Next Web
When you take a picture of a cat and Google’s algorithms place it in a folder called “pets,” with no direction from you, you’re seeing the benefit of image recognition AI. The exact same technology is used by doctors to diagnose diseases on a scale never before possible by humans.
Diabetic retinopathy, caused by type two diabetes, is the fastest-growing cause of preventable blindness. Each of the more than 415 million people living with the disease risks losing their eyesight unless they have regular access to doctors.
In countries like India there are simply too many patients for doctors to treat. There are 4,000 diabetic patients for every ophthalmologist in India, where the US has one for every 1,500 patients.
It’s worse in other developing nations. Of all known cases of diabetic retinopathy more than 80 percent of sufferers live in places with little or no access to care. These people are going blind because of poverty.
This is why companies such as Verily, one of Google’s many sister-companies under Alphabet, chose diabetic retinopathy as the entry-point for massive scale neural network-powered medical insights.
How it works
It’s actually a bit simpler than you might think – and it’s all about the data. Today’s algorithms and deep learning networks are well-suited for processing the individual segments and pixels in an image and classifying the image in one of any number of categories. For example, Google’s ImageNet (the core visual recognition AI for the company) has more than 22,000 categories containing at least 14 million images.
AI can diagnose diabetic retinopathy in the exact same way it determines whether something is a hotdog or not – which is also how physicians do it.
Doctors diagnose diabetic retinopathy through interpreting retina scans. Similar to examining an X-ray or MRI, the physician scans images for specific indications of abnormal markers. They have to be on the lookout for unrelated artifacts such as dust…
The post Seeing is believing: How AI could prevent blindness for 415 million people (right now) appeared first on FeedBox.