Google, the owner of DeepMind Artificial Intelligence lab in London, has agreed to provide funds to the National Health Service (NHS) for research work.
According to sources, after signing an agreement last year in July 2016, Google funded Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust with the amount of 110,000£.
DeepMind and Moorfields have joined hands to work towards a common goal of detecting human eye conditions by using DeepMind’s AI technology. This will help eye care experts to study every minute detail of human eyes that might be left out.
To be accurate, Moorfields is applying DeepMind’s algorithms to 1 million anonymous OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) scans. The objective is to identify whether the algorithms can determine the early signs of age-related macular degeneration and sight loss resulting from diabetes.
At present, DeepMind is involved with four different NHS trusts on different projects. But, it is for the first time that DeepMind has funded a trust.
Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind’s co-founder, said that “What we want to do is train an algorithm to classify a potential diagnosis in an image in the same way that we’ve trained algorithms to classify, say, chairs or plants in photos, or that we’ve trained algorithms to perform well in the Atari [game] simulator.”
He also stated, “Essentially, what it’s doing is learning that a particular cluster of pixels are correlated with a particular outcome, action or object that we’re looking for.”
