"Scientists working for Googles parent company Alphabet have used artificial intelligence to determine a persons risk of having a heart attack from their retinal scan. The methoddetailed in a paper published on Monday in the Nature journal Biomedical Engineeringinvolves analyzing blood vessels in an area of the eye called the retinal fundus. The researchers from Verily formerly known as Google Life Sciences https developed the algorithm in the hope of making accurate assessments of patients cardiovascular health more quickly and easily than current methods. Training deeplearning models on data from more than a quarter of a million patients the scientists were able to predict the cardiovascular risk factors that were not previously thought to be present in retinal fundus images. The risk factors include the persons gender smoking status blood pressure and ageestimated to within four years of the patients actual age. Most cardiovascular risk calculators use some combination of these parameters to identify patients at risk of experiencing either a major cardiovascular event or cardiacrelated mortality within a prespecified time period such as  years the paper https states. However some of these parameters may be unavailableWe therefore explored whether additional signals for cardiovascular risk can be extracted from retinal images which can be obtained quickly cheaply and noninvasively in an outpatient setting. Deeplearning networks have already been applied to produce algorithms capable of diagnosing diseases like melanoma and blindness caused by diabetes. Further tests are required before this latest method can be used within a clinical setting. The researchers concluded The opportunity to one day readily understand the health of a patients blood vessels key to cardiovascular health with a simple retinal image could lower the barrier to engage in critical conversations on preventive measures to protect against a cardiovascular event."