Retinal scans mined by AI to spot signs of poor heart health

Doctors have recognised that changes to the tiny blood vessels in the retina are indicators of broader vascular disease, including problems with the heart.

In the research, led by Leeds University, deep learning techniques were used to train an AI system to automatically read retinal scans and identify those people who, over the following year, were likely to have a heart attack.

Writing in Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers report in their paper - Predicting Infarction through your Retinal Scans and Minimal Personal Information - that the AI system had an accuracy of between 70 per cent and 80 per cent and could be used as a second referral mechanism for in-depth cardiovascular investigation.

Professor Alex Frangi, who holds the Diamond Jubilee Chair in Computational Medicine at Leeds University and is a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, supervised the research. He said: “Cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks, are the leading cause of early death worldwide and the second-largest killer in the UK. This causes chronic ill-health and misery worldwide.