The Institute for Data Science and AI hosted their Advances in Data Science Seminar with guest speaker Professor Pearse Keane.
Professor Keane is a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London and an associate professor at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology. He is originally from Ireland and received his medical degree from University College Dublin (UCD), graduating in 2002.
In 2016, he initiated a formal collaboration between Moorfields Eye Hospital and Google DeepMind, with the aim of developing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for the earlier detection and treatment of retinal disease. In August 2018, the first results of this collaboration were published in the journal, Nature Medicine. In May 2020, he jointly led work, again published in Nature Medicine, to develop an early warning system for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), by far the commonest cause of blindness in many countries.
In October 2019, he was included on the Evening Standard Progress1000 list of most influential Londoners (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/the1000) and in June 2020, he was profiled in The Economist (https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/06/11/the-potential-and-the-pitfalls-of-medical-ai).
In 2020, he was listed on the “The Power List” by The Ophthalmologist magazine, a ranking of the Top 100 most influential people in the world of ophthalmology (https://theophthalmologist.com/power-list/2020).
In his talk, Professor Keane described the motivation - and urgent need - to apply deep learning to ophthalmology, the processes required to establish a research collaboration between the NHS and a company like DeepMind, the initial results of our research, and finally, why he believes ophthalmology could be first branch of medicine to be fundamentally reinvented through the application of artificial intelligence.
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