With help of AI, heart failures can be predicted

RETFound can diagnose range like Parkinson’s disease

Retina provides a direct view of the body’s smallest blood vessels

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionised the world, hasn’t it? It has changed the very way people work and has positively impacted mankind in that it has made life easier for all of us! 

In what perhaps is the latest usage of AI, Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology have announced that they have developed a tool that helps in identifying different medical conditions of the human body, including heart failure. 

Called RETFound, it can diagnose and predict a range of health conditions including Parkinson’s disease. It takes the help of an individual’s retinal images. As per reports, the tool, while being trained, was given 1.6 million retinal images and there was no manual labelling of the images. 

Pearse Keane, an ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London, said, “Over the course of millions of images, the model somehow learns what a retina looks like and what all the features of a retina are.” 

As the retina provides a direct view of the body’s smallest blood vessels, it can act as a mirror for the entire network. Conditions such as hypertension can easily be observed directly through retinal images.