ODI Fridays: AI in the NHS – reinventing the eye exam

ODI Fridays are free lunchtime lectures for everyone. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk. Could ophthalmology be first branch of medicine to be fundamentally reinvented through the application of artificial intelligence? Ophthalmology is among the most technology-driven of the all the medical specialties, with treatments utilising high-spec medical lasers and advanced microsurgical techniques, and diagnostics involving ultra-high resolution imaging. Ophthalmology is also at the forefront of many trailblazing research areas in healthcare, such as stem cell therapy, gene therapy, and – most recently – artificial intelligence. In July 2016, Moorfields announced a formal collaboration with the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, DeepMind. This collaboration involves the sharing of >1,000,000 anonymised retinal scans with DeepMind to allow for the automated diagnosis of diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy (DR). In his presentation, Pearse Keane will describe the motivation – and urgent need – to apply deep learning to ophthalmology, the processes required to establish a research collaboration between the NHS and a company like DeepMind, the initial results of the research.