Headline November 10, 2016/ ''' *ARTIFICIAL* IN MEDICINE '''

''' *ARTIFICIAL* IN MEDICINE '''

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE  [AI}  can sometimes be put to rather very whimsical uses.

In 2012 Google announced that one of its computers, after watching thousands of hours of YouTube videos, had trained itself to identify cats. 

Earlier this year a secretive  Artificial Intelligence  firm called  DeepMind, bought by Google in 2014-

Reported in Nature that it had managed to train a computer to play a series of classic video games, often better than a human could, using nothing more than the games on screen graphics.

But the point of such diversions is to illustrate that, increasingly, computers possess the pattern recognition skills   -identifying faces, interpreting pictures-  

Listening to speech and the like  -that were long thought to be the preserve of humans.

Researchers,  from startups to giant corporations, are now planning to put Artificial Intelligence  to work to solve more serious problems.

One such organization is the California HealthCare Foundation [CHCF]. The disease in the charity's sights is diabetic retinopathy, one of the many long-term complications of diabetes.

*It is caused by the damage to the tiny blood vessels that supply the retina. untreated, it can lead to rental loss of vision. 

Around 80% of diabetics will develop retinal damage after a decade; in rich countries it is one of the leading causes of blindness in the young and middle-aged*.

Much of the damage can be prevented with laser treatment, drug or surgery if caught early, but there are few symptoms at first. 

The best bet is therefore to offer frequent check-ups to diabetics, with trained doctors examining their retinas for subtle but worrying changes.

But diabetes is common and doctors are busy. inspired by recent advances in Artificial Intelligence,  the  CHCF turned for help to a website called Kaggle, which organizes competition for statisticians and data scientists.

[It was founded by Anthony Goldbloom, who once worked as an intern at the economist].

The CHCF uploaded a trove of thousands of images of retinas, both diseased and healthy, stumped up the cash for a $100,000 prize, and let Kaggle's members-

Who range from graduate students to teams working for Artificial Intelligence companies  -get to grips with the problems.

The volunteers used the images to train computer algorithms to note -the sometimes subtle signs of the disease.

The results were impressive.

Doctors agree with each other about whether a picture shoes diabetic retinopathy and,  if so,  how serious it is,  about 84% of the time, says Jared Teo  of  CHCF.

After just five months of work, the contests winner  Benjamin Graham, a statistician at the University of Warwick, in Britain, was able to come up an algorithm that agreed with a doctor's opinion 85% of the time.

The Honour and Serving of the latest  Operational Research  on Technology / '*Artificial Intelligence*  continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing forward. And see you on the following one.

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''' A.I. The Future '''

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