Researchers at Google have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can accurately predict the risk of heart diseases by scanning images of people's retina.
The discovery may point to more ways to diagnose health issues from retinal images, researchers said.
"Using deep learning algorithms trained on data from 284,335 patients, we were able to predict cardiovascular risk factors from retinal images with surprisingly high accuracy for patients from two independent datasets of 12,026 and 999 patients," Lily Peng from the Google Brain Team wrote in a blog post.
The algorithm could distinguish the retinal images of a smoker from that of a non-smoker 71 per cent of the time.