Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
macro-photo-of-human-eye-iris-pupil-eye-lashes-eye-lids-stockpack-adobe-stock.jpg
Macro photo of human eye, iris, pupil, eye lashes, eye lids.

#4 AI Smash Hits 2020 AI Helps Detect Dreaded White Eye Disease

The first step in treatment is correct diagnosis
Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Our Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks is back with the second instalment of 2020 smash hits in AI. Readers may recall that we offered a fun series during the holidays about the oopses and ums and ers in the discipline (typically hyped by uncritical sources). This time, Dr. Marks wants to talk about a serious issue: The use of AI apps developed at his university, Baylor in Texas, to detect “white eye,” an eyeball cancer in children.

“White eye” or leukocoria can be caused by a number of conditions, many of which are treatable. In some cases, however, it is a form of cancer (retinoblastoma). Our story begins at 14:32:

Robert J. Marks: Now, the story behind this number 4 smash hit of 2020 is very local. Very, very close to me.

There’s a professor at Baylor University in chemistry named Bryan Shaw. He had his son Noah who lost an eye to cancer, and he became dedicated to the idea that he wanted to develop something to prohibit this from happening in other people. Not prohibit, but at least have an early detection.

So he contacted a professor in the department of computer science of Baylor University, Greg Hammerly (pictured). And they applied a deep convolutional neural network to look at images of kids’ eyeballs, to tell whether or not they had this condition called white eye. And they developed it. And it was very, very successful. And now is available as an app, a free app. They decided not to make it commercial and try to make money out of it. But this is an app that you could get on Google Play or the Apple app store. And the name of the app is called CRADLE. And what it does is you put the app on your cell phone and it scans the images on your cell phone of your child and tells you whether your kids, the pictures of your kids on your cell phone, have this white eye this indicator of eyeball cancer.

The first step in treatment is correct diagnosis:

Here are the AI 2020 Smash Hits to date:

5 AI 2020 Smash hit: Deepfakes—What they can and can’t do. Deepfakes? Our minds often actually fill in a lot of our background for us when we are not even aware of it. One way of thinking about deepfakes is that they are liked instant mashed potatoes. The water is removed and re-added later.

6 AI Smash Hit: AI defeats fighter pilot hands down. The future of warfare may involve more machine waste but less human carnage. Eric Holloway: It’s going to be a more a hybrid approach where you have the fighter pilot and then a bunch of robot wingman that he can control.

7 AI Smash Hit: Why AI can’t do your thinking for you. Robert J. Marks: you change a pixel or two in an image and the deep convolutional neural network is totally wrong. Eric Holloway: The machine’s confidence in its result is complete certainty and it’s absolutely certain about the wrong result.

8 AI 2020 Smash Hit: Big gains in practical self-driving cars. The people who have been pursuing Level Five self-driving are nowhere but Level Four is working well. Jonathan Bartlett: You can think of Level Four self-driving as an engineering project and Level Five as a philosophy project

9 AI Success: Smarter cars for non-millionaires If your car is a recent model, an affordable aftermarket kit might transform it into a much smarter car. One possible risk is that a hacker could take over your car but, no matter what we do with AI, we must deal with security issues.

10 Smash Hit: #10 AI Success!: Translation gets faster and better. Machine translation, properly used, can help us communicate better. What’s made AI tech translation work so well is not that it’s perfect, but we’re going to have a second pass.

Show Notes

  • 00:31 | Introducing Jonathan Bartlett
  • 00:40 | Introducing Dr. Eric Holloway
  • 02:47 | #5: Deepfaking for Entertainment
  • 10:12 | #3: Paralyzed Man Moves in Mind-Reading Exoskeleton
  • 14:32 | #4: Deep Learning for leukocoria, or “white eye”
  • 16:36 | #2: AI Beats Professionals in Six Player Poker
  • 20:23 | #1: AI Cracks Protein Folding

Additional Resources

Podcast Transcript Download


Mind Matters News

Breaking and noteworthy news from the exciting world of natural and artificial intelligence at MindMatters.ai.

#4 AI Smash Hits 2020 AI Helps Detect Dreaded White Eye Disease