How do you know if you are at risk of heart disease? There are some pretty obvious signs, such as living an unhealthy lifestyle, but sometimes what you see on the surface might not be an accurate representation of what’s going on underneath, which is why sometimes more invasive testing is required.
However it seems that in the future such invasive testing might no longer be necessary. In a paper published today (via The Verge) in the Nature journal Biomedical Engineering, it details the efforts of scientists from Google and its health subsidiary Verily where they have developed an AI that can predict heart disease in a patient just by scanning their eyes.
Through the scanning of the back of the patient’s eye, it will be able to deduce data such as the person’s age, blood pressure, whether or not they smoke, and so on. This is considerably quicker than current methods of testing, and also does not require a blood test, which makes it far less invasive and could encourage more people to check up on their own health.
Now it does seem a bit strange that eye-scanning could be a way to judge the health of your heart, but this is based on established research where the rear interior wall of your eye is packed with blood vessels that can reflect your body’s overall health. That being said, we’re probably quite a long way off from this becoming the standard of checking on our heart health, but it does sound pretty promising.
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