The next phase

While we’re incredibly proud of this progress, this initial research [PDF] would need to be turned into a product and then undergo rigorous clinical trials and regulatory approval before being used in practice. But we’re confident that, in time, this system could transform the diagnosis, treatment and management of eye disease.

Our partners at Moorfields want our research to help them improve care, reduce some of the strain on clinicians, and lower costs - all at the same time. So we’ve also worked hard on what comes next.

If this technology is validated for general use by clinical trials, Moorfields’ clinicians will be able to use it for free across all 30 of their UK hospitals and community clinics, for an initial period of five years. These clinics serve 300,000 patients a year and receive over 1,000 OCT scan referrals every day – each of which could benefit from improved accuracy and speed of diagnosis.

We’re also proud that the work we’ve put into this project will help accelerate many other NHS research efforts. The original dataset held by Moorfields was suitable for clinical use, but not for machine learning research. So we’ve invested significantly in cleaning up, curating and labelling the dataset to create one of the best AI-ready databases for eye research in the world.

This improved database is owned by Moorfields as a non-commercial public asset, and it’s already been used by hospital researchers for nine separate studies into a wide range of conditions - with many more to come. Moorfields can also use DeepMind’s trained AI model for their future non-commercial research efforts.

For all of us who have worked on this since we signed our agreement with Moorfields in 2016, this is a hugely exciting milestone, and another indication of what is possible when clinicians and technologists work together. We’ll continue to keep you updated as we make progress.