A person’s risk of developing heart disease can allegedly be predicted in less than 60 seconds by researchers in London using a new AI-powered retinal analysis tool. The technique, known as QUARTZ (for QUantitative Analysis of Retinal vessels Topology and siZe), assesses an individual’s risk of developing heart disease using retinal vascular imaging and known personal risk factors. The veins and arteries in the back of the eye allow the retina to act as a “non-invasive window” into the circulatory system of a person.
VISION
Doctors have long been able to assess a person’s risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, and other diseases by manually looking at the retina. Some existing tests similarly use images of someone’s retinal vasculature to detect whether they’re currently experiencing a disease. However, human observation lacks the precision necessary to determine a person’s risk of developing (or worse, dying from) heart disease later in life, while existing predictive tests require extra steps like blood pressure measurements and blood tests.
Now, scientists may quickly gather important cardiac insights by scanning anyone’s eye. According to their research, which was just published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, a person’s retinal vasculature snapshot, along with risk factors like smoking, having had a heart attack before, and taking medications to treat high blood pressure, can be used to predict that person’s risk of cardiovascular disease with an accuracy rate that is comparable to that of more traditional, less practical methods.
SIMILARITY
Machine learning algorithms are as biassed as the data they’re based on, as we noted last week in our piece on the White House’s planned “AI Bill of Rights,” and QUARTZ is no exception. There is little room to evaluate whether QUARTZ forecasts heart disease risk as effectively among persons of colour because UK Biobank’s data is 94.6 percent white, The Verge noted. Additionally, the researchers point out in their analysis that the UK Biobank and EPIC data come from a population that is healthier than the UK (and the rest of the world) as a whole.
But it’ll be a while before QUARTZ finds its way into real-life medical settings. As with any other novel medical tool or system, QUARTZ requires rigorous testing before it can become eligible for use on regular patients. The team hopes to confirm the tool’s efficacy with a wider, more diverse population during this time.
