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In the system Thailand had been using, nurses take photos of patients’ eyes during check-ups and send them off to be looked at by a specialist elsewhere—a process that can take up to 10 weeks. AI developed by Google Health can identify signs of diabetic retinopathy from an eye scan with more than 90% accuracy—which the team calls “human specialist level”—and, in principle, give a result in less than 10 minutes.
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When it worked well, the AI did speed things up. But it sometimes failed to give a result at all. Like most image recognition systems, the deep-learning model had been trained on high-quality scans; to ensure accuracy, it was designed to reject images that fell below a certain threshold of quality. With nurses scanning dozens of patients an hour and often taking the photos in poor lighting conditions, more than a fifth of the images were rejected.
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“This is a crucial study for anybody interested in getting their hands dirty and actually implementing AI solutions in real-world settings,” says [AI researcher] Hamid Tizhoosh.
