The partnership has brought together leading NHS eye health professionals with some of the UK’s top technologists at DeepMind. Together, they have used thousands of historic de-personalised eye scans to successfully train computer systems to identify signs of eye disease and recommend how patients should be referred for care.

In August 2018 we announced ground-breaking results of the first stage of the partnership. The results showed that the AI system could match world-leading experts in diagnosing a range of eye conditions, recommending the correct referral decision for over 50 eye diseases with 94% accuracy.

The next step is to build on these initial results to continue with the overall goal of exploring whether AI technology could achieve real patient benefit through the detection, diagnosis and prediction of sight threatening conditions.

The Moorfields Reading Centre helped develop the training set for the DeepMind algorithm through manual grading of thousands of OCT scans. Read about the work and our publication on the DeepMind website