indica News Bureau-
While Artificial Intelligence plays a major role in detecting eye diseases and problems by analyzing medical images, Google and a team of British doctors has launched a new system that can detect signs that can lead to blindness in certain people in the future. The new invention was published in journal Nature on Monday.
It is a significant leap forward by predicting which patients with a common condition are most likely to lose their sight. The new technology is designed to predict imminent risk of total vision loss in patients with age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in the developed world. The paper reports that the computer outperformed most eye specialists in determining which patients were most likely to lose sight in both eyes, said the journal.
According to financial times, Google’s deep-learning research, involving a large dataset of retinal images used in diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR), a diabetes-linked pathology that causes irreversible blindness, shows the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare.
In 2016, the tech giant announced its deep-learning algorithm that had been trained using a dataset of 128,000 images—each of which had been reviewed by 3-7 expert ophthalmologists from a panel of 54—to accurately interpret underlying symptoms (microaneurysms, haemorrhages, hard exudates, etc) from fundus images (a specific type of imaging of the eye) and detect referable DR.
Given the pathology affects 18% of the 70 million diabetics in India—and with 415 million diabetics worldwide, is now the fastest growing cause of blindness—Google’s algorithm vastly improves the prospects of DR being screened by doctors faster, and in greater numbers than is possible in an unassisted scenario. For countries strained for resources and healthcare infrastructure, this is truly a manna since diagnosis in the early stages can prevent/delay onset of blindness.
The algorithm’s performance was tested with 12,000 images, with the majority opinion of panels of expert ophthalmologists drawn from Google’s pool of 54 on each of these images set as the reference standard. The panel members had been selected on the basis of high consistency of accurate diagnosis. The algorithm’s performance on diagnosing the disease and its severity, in terms of combined sensitivity and specificity matrix, was 0.95 (the highest score possible being 1), slightly above the median score of 0.91 for the ophthalmologists who were part of the tests. Google has since been working with retinal specialists to build even more robust reference standards, including focussing on 3D retinal images. It is running field trials for AI-assisted diabetic retinopathy screening in Sankara Nethralaya and Aravind Eye Hospital in India.
Further, research by the company showed that its algorithm is capable of aiding doctors in detecting cases that they would have otherwise missed; what makes this machine-human collaboration even more exciting is the fact that the company’s researchers found that the highest accuracy was recorded when the algorithm complemented the skills of the doctor rather than an algo-alone or doctor-alone scenario, reported Nature.
