Google's DeepMind AI To Use 1 Million NHS Eye Scans To Spot Diseases Earlier (arstechnica.com)

Google DeepMind has announced its second collaboration with the NHS, as part of which it will work with Moorfields Eye Hospital in east London to build a machine learning system which will eventually be able to recognise sight-threatening conditions from just a digital scan of the eye. The five-year research project will draw on one million anonymous eye scans which are held on Moorfields' patient database, reports Ars Technica, with the aim to speed up the complex and time-consuming process of analysing eye scans. From the report:The hope is that this will allow diagnoses of common causes of sight loss, like diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, to be spotted more rapidly and hence be treated more effectively. For example, Google says that up to 98 percent of sight loss resulting from diabetes can be prevented by early detection and treatment. Two million people are already living with sight loss in the UK, of whom around 360,000 are registered as blind or partially-sighted. Google quotes estimates that the number of people suffering from sight loss in the UK will double by 2050. Improvements in detection and treatment would therefore have a major impact on the quality of life for large numbers of people in the UK and around the world.

Comments

"anonymous eye scans"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think enough evidence exists that anonymous medical records don't exist - they effectively form a pseudonymous fingerprint and can be correlated with other databases to associate with names.

It's be interesting to know how many of these people actively opted in with sufficiently informed consent to know that Google might be processing their data for profit.

Re: "anonymous eye scans"

[Anonymous Coward]

No one opted in. The NHS digitised their records and were supposed to contact everyone to offer an opt out. No-one I know was contacted, and the plan was officially abandoned with consent assumed despite there high number of people that complained.

Re: "anonymous eye scans"

[Anonymous Coward]

My local GP surgery didn't want its records to be shared and ended up asking all its patients to opt out from as many Department of Health data sharing schemes as possible, but maybe hospitals try to get by the rules by pretending the data is anonymised.

There's a huge NHS ophthalmology centre opening nearby. I would not use it if I ran the risk that Google would be able to access my data in any sense.

Re: "anonymous eye scans"

[Richard_at_work]

Ask your GP Surgery to add the following codes to your records, they opt you out of data sharing:

XaZ89 - stops non-anonymous data sharing
XaaVL - stops anonymous data sharing

Re: "anonymous eye scans"

[nospam007]

"There's a huge NHS ophthalmology centre opening nearby. I would not use it if I ran the risk that Google would be able to access my data in any sense."

You should have begun that sentence with "I'd rather go blind ..."

Re:"anonymous eye scans"

[Anonymous Coward]

"For example, Google says that up to 98 percent of sight loss resulting from diabetes can be prevented by early detection and treatment."

Incorrect. It would be more correct to say that 98% of sight loss resulting from diabetes can be brought up for treatment. But if the treatment was: "Don't stuff your food hole with crap so often", it's entirely possible that a patient won't follow through and would lose their eye sight still.

Re:"anonymous eye scans"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's going to be interesting to see how early disease identification* beats a subset of nerds' paranoid squeaks.

* This data is training the system; it's all historic, per TFA.

other uses for the data

[Anonymous Coward]

Why have some special deal with google only ?

If it's truly not personally identifiable, why don't they just release the data for any academic researchers to use in their machine learning datasets?
Perhaps they can use it to figure out other diseases and other information that is interesting...

Re:other uses for the data

[bigpat]

Why have some special deal with google only ?

If it's truly not personally identifiable, why don't they just release the data for any academic researchers to use in their machine learning datasets?
Perhaps they can use it to figure out other diseases and other information that is interesting...

Although I don't read into this any nefarious intent....
I think some public openness in the training data set so that different teams of researchers can try out different machine learning algorithms is a very good idea. All you need to do is remove identity information and keep the diagnosis tags for the training.

Re:other uses for the data

[ShanghaiBill]

I think some public openness in the training data set so that different teams of researchers can try out different machine learning algorithms is a very good idea. All you need to do is remove identity information and keep the diagnosis tags for the training.

It is not that simple. Even if identifying information is stripped out, it can be reconstructed by correlating with other databases. Retina scans can be used to diagnose some very sensitive conditions, including sexually transmitted disease. Specific researchers should be able to access the data, with appropriate safeguards and ethical oversight, but there is no way that this data should be public.

And the only way to treat this is by

[melted]

And the only way to treat this is by injecting a $1K+ per shot medication into your eyeball once a month (Lucentis). And the treatment is not permanent: macular degeneration returns again and again.

Re:And the only way to treat this is by

[jeffb (2.718)]

Imagine that -- a brand-new and effective treatment for a formerly-intractable disease is kind of expensive, and doesn't offer a one-shot cure. The evil doctors who came up with this diabolical scheme should be stripped of their medical credentials, if not summarily executed.

If you'd rather just stare at your feet and hope really hard that nothing's wrong, that's still free, and nobody's stopping you.

Re: And the only way to treat this is by

[melted]

It's still intractable unless you're willing to spend $10k/yr per eye for the rest of your life. And even then it doesn't fix the symptoms completely, and merely slows the progression of the disease. That is, if you don't have a reaction to this drug, in which case you may lose an eye, or both.

Re: And the only way to treat this is by

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone with a family history of early onset age-related macular degeneration, even $20k per year would leave me much better off, as I'll be able to carry on working. At present I'm running my finances assuming I have to stop programming at 50.

Re:And the only way to treat this is by

[Anonymous Coward]

As the article TITLE says this is the NHS. So

1. Patients pay nothing at point of use. If NICE has decided a particular treatment makes sense, they buy it centrally.

2. Actually NHS policy is to use a newer, less famous drug for most Wet AMD cases. I know, you read about Lucentis and it doesn't _seem_ like that long ago. Well it's an old treatment now and not considered the best available for most patients

3. The NHS does not pay inflated "Hey sucker, we can charge you what we like" US hospital prices. It negotiates with manufacturers for the lowest price it can get, if the price isn't low enough it walks away, because it knows it will spend the money elsewhere anyway. Unlike a private medical insurance company the NHS can't make a profit, if it saves a million dollars by refusing to buy Lucentis, it will spend the million dollars on cataract surgery, or flu vaccine, or HIV prevention campaigns.

Re: And the only way to treat this is by

[Anonymous Coward]

Imaging has transformed ophthalmology - OCT imaging enables you to see deep into the retina, and that's transformed diagnosis. Ophthalmologists are spotting patterns - this type of swelling here has a good prognosis, that kind of pathology there has a bad prognosis. This person would do better on steroids, the other person better on Lucentis/Avastin/Eylea...

But the analysis of these images requires a trained human using specialist software basically clicking and dragging on these images. It's hugely time consuming. Almost everyone who lives long enough will get age-related eye disease. These are millions and millions of patients worldwide. Clearly, AI on all that data will 1. speed things up and reduce costs, and 2. reveal more of retinal disease's mysteries for the good of humankind and medicine.

Also, Moorfields is a great eye hospital, but it's still a state-funded NHS one. It isn't incredibly flush with cash, and it doesn't have access to anything like DeepMind to analyse these images - having said that, where in academia does? Partnering with Google is a big win. Well done them.

Re:And the only way to treat this is by

[melted]

It's not a "hospital" price. It's just the price of the drug, worldwide. US hospital prices are higher than that. And I think Margaret Thatcher explained many years ago that there's no free lunch, and eventually _someone_ pays for Lucentis. And that someone is not the government.

Interesting to look for disease markers

[afeeney]

While iridology is bunk , it would be interesting to see what disease markers could be found with eye exams. We already know about a few. Ankylosing spondylitis is often associated with eye inflammation and abnormalities in the retina can be associated with diabetes, hypertension, cardiac disease, and stroke, as well as a lot of systemic diseases.

Eye exams are generally non-invasive and the scans could be set up almost anywhere.

Re:Interesting to look for disease markers

[Anonymous Coward]

God yes, ophthalmologists are all over that.

https://theophthalmologist.com/issues/0113/301/

https://theophthalmologist.com/issues/0815/light-years-ahead/

(Registration wall [:-(], but free)

Some diseases stand out more than others.

[jeffb (2.718)]

There was a bit of news coverage a while back about childhood eye cancers being diagnosed from snapshots taken with on-camera flash. I have no doubt that detailed scans, processed against a very large dataset, could reveal other diseases that doctors currently don't catch early.

I know, I know, OMG GOOGLE BIG BROTHER, but I'd rather save my privacy outrage for proposals that don't offer a chance to substantially reduce human suffering.

Anonymous?

[Macdude]

Anonymous eye scans? Isn't that like saying anonymous fingerprints? Aren't eye scans one of the biometric methods you can use to identify people?

Was this done on an opt-in basis or did the NHS just decide to give everyone's private medical information to Google.

Re: Anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Internet connected iris scanners do you use on a daily basis?
I'm willing to bet its a big fat zero.

The database of eye images contains no identifying information, so unless your iris scan is already floating around on the internet there is literally no way for Google or anybody else to identify you through it. And even if they could, so what? Google ad-sense eye drop ads?
You reached a new level of tin foil hattery.

Re: Anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, if this is training data, then it isn't just pictures of eyes, it's also what known medical issues the owners of those eyes have. So if Google were to match the eyes to a person they'd be able to match that persons medical history with a person.

Not that I expect that is a plausible outcome. You'd expect some pretty strong ethical controls in place.

Re:Anonymous?

[dave420]

Yes, it's anonymous. Just like fingerprints can be. No-one can look at a fingerprint and know whose it is without also having an identified fingerprint. Get it?

Google and government in bed?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't say? I mean, it's not like they are a front for the CIA/NSA.

Could be worse

[Anonymous Coward]

They could be deep-mining our butts to look for colon cancer.

When are they going to use it to read films?

[hawkfish]

Consider: There is already a huge corpus of tagged digital data for training, knowing the results can be time-critical, and the specialists cost money. This job is already being outsourced remotely; the next step is outsourcing to software.

DeepMind alternatives

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Does anyone know what happened to all the rumored open-source clones of DeepMind? Did any of them get off the ground?

Whether built off of TensorFlow or not.

To Spot Diseases Earlier

[frovingslosh]

Next step, checking fingerprints to spot diseases earlier.

Doctors are going obsolete

[fph il quozientatore]

MDs are afraid of becoming obsolete, like horse farriers, photo and film shops, and soon also taxi drivers. Google's AI is probably already better than your non-specialist doctor at diagnosing diseases. So I expect they will be actively opposed to any attempt to step up machine learning for the health sciences.

Re:Doctors are going obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

Pinning a donkey tail on a chart of diseases is more useful than your average doctor at diagnosing. However google has a similar fail-rate with taking projects like this off the ground. This is just crony money from all that lobbying. It was never meant to amount to anything.