MAMAS, DON'T LET YOU BABIES GROW UP TO BE DOCTORS:

People with diabetes frequently suffer from a condition called diabetic retinopathy, where the tiny blood vessels at the back of their eyes (the retina) become damaged and start to leak. About one in three diabetics have this kind of damage, and if left untreated it can cause permanent blindness. With early detection, though, it's quite treatable.

The problem is that many people don't have access to an ophthalmologist who can diagnose them. There are 387 million diabetics worldwide who need to see specialists in order to catch the disease early, and our current prevention isn't working well enough -- diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of vision impairment and blindness in the working-age population.

So Google devised a way to use deep machine learning to teach a neural network how to detect diabetic retinopathy from photos of patients' eyes. They published their work in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday.

A neural network is kind of like an artificial brain, albeit a simple one. By showing it a huge set of images of patients with and without retina damage, engineers can train the network to distinguish between diseased and non-diseased eyes. After the training, the Google team tested the neural network to see if the algorithm could detect diabetic retinopathy as well as ophthalmologists, who had seen the same images.

Google's algorithm performed slightly better than the human ophthalmologists, which suggests that the neural network could help screen patients in the future, or at least assist doctors in the diagnosis process.

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