The search engine announced the news on Monday. Together with Verily, Google’s health-tech branch, they have developed an A.I. that can determine if a person has high blood pressure or is at risk of a stroke or heart attack, just by scanning their eye. Researchers were able to “train” the A.I. by showing it thousands of images of scanned retinas, allowing it to recognize when a person is at risk for heart problems. Right now, the algorithm is about 70 percent accurate, meaning it still doesn’t perform as well as blood tests. If that percentage begins to creep up and rival the accuracy of blood tests, it could provide a cheaper diagnosis option.
