Personally, I’m terrified of artificial intelligence (AI).

At the risk of sounding like Elon Musk, the idea that machines could start outthinking us…well you’ve seen Terminator. It’s not pretty.

Let’s also not forget Microsoft’s A.I. chatbot that spent less than a day on Twitter, assimilated the worst attributes of the internet, and became a right-wing asshole.

Maybe it’s not all creepy or weird though.

DeepMind, Google’s AI business, has been working on a medical product that will assist doctors in diagnosing more than 50 life-threatening diseases.

Today Online reports that:

DeepMind’s AI technology could analyse 3D retinal scans for signs of major eye diseases, such as glaucoma or diabetic retinopathy, and its algorithm was better than eight retinal specialists at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital in making referrals when tested on 997 patient scans, according to a study published in the Nature Medicine journal on Monday (Aug 13).

DeepMind and its partners in the research – Moorfields and the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology – said they plan prospective clinical trials of the technology in 2019.

Early tests have shown that the technology is exponentially more accurate than human doctors. If the clinical trials are successful, DeepMind intends on releasing the technology for free for a five year period.

The software would be the first time a DeepMind AI algorithm using machine learning has ended up in a healthcare product. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has several initiatives aimed at using artificial intelligence to improve healthcare.

Earlier this year, Verily, an Alphabet company that says its goal is to extend human lifespans, teamed up with AI experts from Google, to develop an algorithm that could spot a range of cardiovascular issues from a different kind of retinal image.

DeepMind itself has an entire division devoted to healthcare, and has research projects with the UK’s National Health Service and with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, among others.

It all sounds good, but DeepMind’s work with the UK National Health Service has been controversial.

Last year, the UK data privacy watchdog said a different NHS trust, the Royal Free Hospital, had illegally provided 1.6 million patient records to DeepMind to help it develop a mobile app that would alert doctors if patients were at risk of developing acute kidney injury.

In the eye scan study, DeepMind and its NHS partners took steps to avoid similar issues. Dr Pearse Keane, the senior doctor who lead the Moorfields team working on the project, said in an interview that the hospital “did everything we could” to anonymise the 16,000 eye scans it used both to train and test the algorithms DeepMind developed.

This process was approved and audited by the hospital’s information governance department, and DeepMind was barred from trying to re-identify patients whose scans were being used.

Now that they’re functioning ethically, DeepMind is doing research that looks into:

…a type of eye scan called optical coherence tomography (OCT) that can be used to diagnose age-related macular degeneration (AMD), now the leading cause of blindness in the developed world, as well as other retinal disorders linked to conditions such as diabetes.

And the test results look promising:

To benchmark the system, DeepMind tested the software on 1,000 scans not used to train the AI, and compared its performance to four senior ophthalmologists and four optometrists who had also been specifically trained to interpret OCT scans.

The researchers found their AI could make the correct referral decision for over 50 eye diseases with 94 per cent accuracy – better than most of the humans.

Dr Keane added that the AI can also analyse the scan immediately while patients would ordinarily have to wait days for a specialist to review the images.

The software had zero false negatives (cases where it missed indicators of disease), and only two false positives where the software recommended urgent treatment for cases where doctors would normally just monitor the situation over time.

DeepMind’s software used two separate neural networks, a kind of machine learning loosely based on how the human brain works. One neural network labels features in OCT images associated with eye diseases, while the other diagnoses eye conditions based on these features.

Splitting the task means that — unlike an individual network that makes diagnoses directly from medical imagery – DeepMind’s AI isn’t a black box whose decision-making rationale is completely opaque to human doctors, Dr Keane said

I like that the technology, which could be a major medical breakthrough, will be released for free.

Still not crazy about AI, though.

[source:todayonline]