Ophthalmology is among the most technology-driven of the all the medical specialties, with treatments utilizing 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 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 my presentation, I will describe the motivation - and urgent need - to apply deep learning to ophthalmology, the processes required to establish a research collaboration between the National Health Service (NHS) and a company like DeepMind, the initial results of our research, and finally, why I believe that ophthalmology could be first branch of medicine to be fundamentally reinvented through the application of artificial intelligence.
展开▼