Verily, a health-tech subsidiary owned by Google, has come up with a test that can diagnose heart disease by simply analyzing a person’s eyes. Through this analysis the software can discover the patient’s age, blood pressure, smoking habits and more, predicting whether or not they’ll face a major cardiac event in the future, or if they’ve experienced one in the past.
According to The Verge, Google used machine learning to develop and train the software’s algorithm, analyzing the data of 300,000 patients, scanning their medical information, comparing the results to each other, and doing eye scans. When comparing the eyes of different patients, the software was able to accurately recognize which patient was healthy and which one had suffered from a cardiovascular disease 70 percent of the time.
Scanning someone’s eye to know if they’ll have heart disease may sound like a strange and random thing to do, but there’s sufficient research that backs this up. The interior surface of the eye, known as the fundus, is an area full of blood vessels that reflect the overall health of your body and that provides important medical information.
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This method, if approved, would result in a faster way of diagnosing heart disease since it would require no blood tests. It seems like AI doctors are becoming less of a fantasy and more of a reality the more that we invest in science and technology. And, as an added bonus, it’s great that the future involves fewer needles and blood tests.
