Opening the Black box presents: The Moorfields-DeepMind Collaboration - Reinventing the Eye Examination

November's seminar in the "Opening the Black Box" series was very thought provoking and provided much discussion! December's seminar will be on Wed 12 Dec at 3pm in WLFB 207/208. We have a different perspective this month. Pearse Keane is an opthalmologist from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and he will be talking about their collaboration with Google DeepMind (see below).

Biosketch

Pearse A. Keane, MD, FRCOphth, is a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London and an NIHR Clinician Scientist, based at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London (UCL). Dr Keane specialises in applied ophthalmic research, with a particular interest in retinal imaging and new technologies. In April 2015, he was ranked no. 4 on a worldwide ranking of ophthalmologists under 40, published in "the Ophthalmologist” journal (https://theophthalmologist.com/the-power-list-2015/). In 2016, he initiated a formal collaboration between Moorfields Eye Hospital and Google DeepMind, with the aim of applying machine learning to automated diagnosis of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. In August 2018, the first results of this collaboration were published in the journal, Nature Medicine. 

The Moorfields-DeepMind Collaboration - Reinventing the Eye Examination

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 world’s leading 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 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.