Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News
The computer will see you now.
Artificial intelligence algorithms may soon bring the diagnostic know-how of an eye doctor to primary care offices and walk-in clinics, speeding up the detection of health problems and the start of treatment, especially in areas where specialized doctors are scarce.
The first such program — trained to spot symptoms of diabetes-related vision loss in eye images — is pending approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.While other already approved AI programs help doctors examine medical images, there’s “not a specialist looking over the shoulder of [this] algorithm,” says Michael Abràmoff, who founded and heads a company that developed the system under FDA review, dubbed IDx-DR. “It makes the clinical decision on its own.”
IDx-DR and similar AI programs, which are learning to predict everything from age-related sight loss to heart problems just by looking at eye images, don’t follow preprogrammed guidelines for how to diagnose a disease. They’re machine-learning algorithms that researchers teach to recognize symptoms of a particular condition, using example images labeled with whether or not that patient had that condition.
A new algorithm examines retinal fundus images of eyes (left) to predict cardiovascular health. A green heat map overlaid on one of these images (right) highlights the areas of the image — most notably the blood vessels — that factor most heavily into the algorithm’s prediction about that patient’s blood pressure. Higher blood pressure can put a patient at risk of heart arrhythmias or heart attack.
IDx-DR studied over 1 million eye images to learn how to recognize symptoms of diabetic retinopathy, a condition that develops when high blood sugar damages retinal blood vessels (SN Online: 6/29/10). Between 12,000 and 24,000 people in the United States…
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