Google’s new AI algorithm can predict heart disease by looking at your eyes

Good news for health and fitness buffs. Tech has come to your aid. Scientists from Google and its health-tech subsidiary Verily have discovered a new way to assess a person’s risk of heart disease using machine learning.

They do this by analyzing scans of the back of a patient’s eye. Then the company’s software is able to accurately deduce data, including an individual’s age, blood pressure, and whether or not they smoke.

All this can be then further used to predict their risk of suffering a major cardiac event eg an heart attack, with roughly the same accuracy as current leading methods.

 However, this method will be needed to be tested more thoroughly before it can be used in a clinical setting.

Therefore the algorithm potentially makes it quicker and easier for doctors to analyze a patient’s cardiovascular risk, as it doesn’t require a blood test. Thus the capacity for it to save lives is hugely.