Eyes could reveal heart attack risk

San Francisco - Deep learning applied to a retinal fundus image, a photograph that includes the blood vessels of the eye, can predict risk factors for heart diseases.

Knowing the risk of a heart attack or a stroke could soon become as simple as an eye test as researchers at Google and its health-tech arm Verily have found that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) could help identify signals of heart diseases through retinal images.
"AI offers us the potential for new, less invasive tests for heart health - predicting cardiovascular results from retinal images with computer vision - encouraging early results!," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Tuesday while referring the study in a tweet.
The study, published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, showed that deep learning applied to a retinal fundus image, a photograph that includes the blood vessels of the eye, can predict risk factors for heart diseases - from blood pressure to smoking status.
The algorithm that the researchers produced can even help predict the occurrence of a future major cardiovascular event on par with current measures, said Michael McConnell, head of Cardiovascular Health Innovations at Verily in a blog post.