In our eyes, Google’s software sees heart attack risk

As my PI notes, a lot of the success here can be explained by the model&#x27;s excellent ability to determine age from the images of the retina. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;skathire&#x2F;status&#x2F;965661596503638016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;skathire&#x2F;status&#x2F;965661596503638016</a><p>This is quite good age detection - other efforts that I&#x27;ve seen (from face images, rather than retina images) are +&#x2F;- 5 years, whereas this paper gets age to within +&#x2F;- 3 years or so.<p>The fact that the model automatically detects anatomical features that humans recognize as being important is promising for a variety of applications, I think.

I suspect that it&#x27;s mostly the amount of data that allows this, and that the software is just using run-off-the-mill statistics&#x2F;ML. The title should reflect that. It&#x27;s not the software, it&#x27;s the data.

Remember what happened they tried to predict the flu. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;can-learn-epic-failure-google-flu-trends&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;can-learn-epic-failure-google-...</a><p>In <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kaggle.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;diabetic-retinopathy-detection" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kaggle.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;diabetic-retinopathy-detection</a> actually ML algo did better than humans. Yet it will take time for apply these widely.

Pretty cool to see those photos. I used to work at a company that makes fundus cameras that take those kinds of pictures.

Any optician can do exactly the same thing during a simple check of your eyes. In this case I can’t see the benefit of this type of screening. The tool used by the optician is just a cheap lantern, but only the tool needed by the computer is way more expensive.

Honest question: why is that an alternative medicine eg. Iridology is seen as quackery but a computer predicting heart attack risk is not? I know the science behind AI but from a patient point of view, they both analyze the eye.

&gt;Google’s algorithms were able to predict whether someone had high blood pressure or was at risk of a heart attack or stroke<p>How is that different from just measuring the blood pressure (with really inexpensive device)?

What do you do after you discover you are at risk? Get your affairs in order?

i think it&#x27;ll be quite some time until ML and CV can do the breadth of diagnostics for all possible things.<p>my wife is an optometrist. just from looking at retinas, she finds brain tumors among other scary systemic problems. even if you have perfect vision, go in for an exam, it can literally save your life.

&gt; opening a new opportunity for artificial intelligence in the vast and lucrative global health industry.<p>well done! google will join the lucrative industry of the people’s health. the rich will survive, the other will build the machine to make them survive.

Anybody have the link or how can I test myself?