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Mustafa Suleyman 1831_preview (1)DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman.DeepMind
  • Google’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind has published „really significant“ research showing its algorithm can identify around 50 eye diseases by looking at retinal eye scans.




OCT scanA technician examines an OCT scan.DeepMind

What is especially significant about the research, according to DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, is that the AI has a level of „explainability“ that could boost doctors‘ trust in its recommendations.

„It’s possible for the clinician to interpret what the algorithm is thinking,“ he told Business Insider. „[They can] look at the underlying segmentation.“

In other words, the AI looks less like a mysterious black box that’s spitting out results. It labels pixels on the eye scan that corresponds to signs of a particular disease, Suleyman explained, and can calculate its confidence in its own findings with a percentage score. „That’s really significant,“ he said.

DeepMind's algorithm analysing an OCT eye scanDeepMind’s AI analysing an OCT scan.DeepMind

Suleyman described the findings as a „research breakthrough“ and said the next step was to prove the AI works in a clinical setting. That, he said, would take a number of years. Once DeepMind is in a position to deploy its AI across NHS hospitals in the UK, it will provide the service for free for five years.

Patients are at risk of losing their sight because doctors can’t look at their eye scans in time

British eye specialists have been warning for years that patients are at risk of losing their sight because the NHS is overstretched, and because the UK has an ageing population.

Part of the reason DeepMind and Moorfields took up the research project was because clinicians are „overwhelmed“ by the demand for eye scans, Suleyman said.

„If you have a sight-threatening disease, you want treatment as soon as possible,“ he explained. „And unlike in A&E, where a staff nurse will talk to you and make an evaluation of how serious your condition is, then use that evaluation to decide how quickly you are seen. When an [eye] scan is submitted, there isn’t a triage of your scan according to its severity.“

OCT scanA patient having an OCT scan.DeepMind

Putting eye scans through the AI could speed the entire process up.

„In the future, I could envisage a person going into their local high street optician, and have an OCT scan done and this algorithm would identify those patients with sight-threatening disease at the very early stage of the condition,“ said Dr Pearse Keane, consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital.

DeepMind’s AI was trained on a database of almost 15,000 eye scans, stripped of any identifying information. DeepMind worked with clinicians to label areas of disease, then ran those labelled images through its system. Suleyman said the two-and-a-half project required „huge investment“ from DeepMind and involved 25 staffers, as well as the researchers from Moorfields.

People are still worried about a Google-linked company having access to medical data

Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for £400 million ($509 million), and the British AI company is probably most famous for AlphaGo, its algorithm that beat the world champion at the strategy game Go.

While DeepMind has remained UK-based and independent from Google, the relationship has attracted scrutiny. The main question is whether Google, a private US company, should have access to the sensitive medical data required for DeepMind’s health arm.

DeepMind was criticised in 2016 for failing to disclose its access to historical medical data during a project with Royal Free Hospital. Suleyman said the eye scans processed by DeepMind were „completely anonymised.“

„You can’t identify whose scans it was. We’re in quite a different regime, this is very much research, and we’re a number of years from being able to deploy in practice,“ he said.

Suleyman added: „How this has the potential to have transform the NHS is very clear. We’ve been very conscious that this will be a model that’s published, and available to others to implement.

„The labelled dataset is available to other researchers. So this is very much an open and collaborative relationship between equals that we’ve worked hard to foster. I’m proud of that work.“

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What Is inside McDonalds‘ French Fries?

McDonalds Fries


Mickey D’s uses varieties like the Russet Burbank, which have a nice oval shape and just the right balance of starch and sugar. Excess sugar can cause a fry to have brown spots where it’s over-caramelized, leaving a burnt taste and deviating from the uniform yellow-arches color. Just in case, the spuds are blanched after slicing, removing surplus sugar.


Taters can turn a nasty hue even after they’re fried—iron in the spud reacts with the potato’s phenolic compounds, discoloring the tissue. The phosphate ions in SAPP trap the iron ions, stalling the reaction and keeping the potatoes nice and white throughout the process.


In the good old days, McDonald’s fries were cooked in beef tallow. But customer demand for less saturated fat prompted a switch to vegetable oil in the early ’90s. Here, that means oils of varying saturations combined into something reminiscent of beef tallow. There’s canola (about 8 percent saturated fat), soybean oil (16 percent), and hydrogenated soybean oil (94 percent). And to replace the essence of beef tallow? “Natural beef flavor,” which contains hydrolyzed wheat and milk proteins that could be a source of meaty-tasting amino acids.


That’s right, the fries get two batches of vegetable oil—one for par-frying at the factory and another for the frying bath on location. The second one adds corn oil and an additive called TBHQ, or tertbutylhydroquinone, which at high doses can cause nasty side effects in rats (mmmm … stomach tumors). McDonald’s uses this oil for all its frying, so the stuff usually sits around in big vats, which means it can go rancid as oxygen plucks hydrogens from lipids. TBHQ acts as an antioxidant, replacing those pilfered hydrogens with its own supply.


A brief dip in a corn-based sugar solution replaces just enough of the natural sweet stuff that was removed by blanching. The result is a homogeneous outer layer that caramelizes evenly. You’ll add more sugar later when you squirt on the ketchup.


Sprinkled on just after frying, the crystals are a uniform diameter—just big enough to get absorbed quickly by crackling-hot oil. Now add ketchup and you’ve achieved the hedonistic trifecta: fat, salt, and sugar.




Phlebotomy. Even the word sounds archaic—and that’s nothing compared to the slow, expensive, and inefficient reality of drawing blood and having it tested. As a college sophomore, Elizabeth Holmes envisioned a way to reinvent old-fashioned phlebotomy and, in the process, usher in an era of comprehensive superfast diagnosis and preventive medicine.

That was a decade ago. Holmes, now 30, dropped out of Stanford and founded a company called Theranos with her tuition money. Last fall it finally introduced its radical blood-testing service in a Walgreens pharmacy near company head­quarters in Palo Alto, California. (The plan is to roll out testing centers nation­wide.) Instead of vials of blood—one for every test needed—Theranos requires only a pinprick and a drop of blood. With that they can perform hundreds of tests, from standard cholesterol checks to sophisticated genetic analyses. The results are faster, more accurate, and far cheaper than conventional methods.


None of this would work if Theranos hadn’t figured out how to make testing trans­parent and inexpensive. The company plans to charge less than 50 percent of the standard Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. And unlike the rest of the testing industry, Theranos lists its prices on its website: blood typing, $2.05; cholesterol, $2.99; iron, $4.45. If all tests in the US were performed at those kinds of prices, the company says, it could save Medicare $98 billion and Medicaid $104 billion over the next decade.

What was your goal in starting a lab-testing company?

We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.

There are a billion tests done every year in the United States, but too many of them are done in the emergency room. If you were able to do some of those tests before a person gets checked into the ER, you’d start to see problems earlier; you’d have time to intervene before a patient needed to go to the hospital. If you remove the biggest barriers to these tests, you’ll see them used in smarter ways.

What was your motivation to launch Theranos at the age of 19? What set you on this road?

I definitely am afraid of needles. It’s the only thing that actually scares me. But I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking.

You’re not alone in your fear of needles.

Phlebotomy is such a huge inhibitor to people getting tested. Some studies say that a substantive percentage of patients who get a lab requisition don’t follow through, because they’re scared of needles or they’re afraid of worrying, waiting to hear that something is wrong. We wanted to make this service convenient, to bring it to places close to people’s homes, and to offer rapid results.

Why the focus on rapid results?

We can get results, on average, in less than four hours. And this can be very helpful for doctors and patients, because it means that someone could, for example, go to a Walgreens in the morning to get a routine test for something their doctor is tracking, and the physician can have the results that afternoon when they see the patient. And we’re able to do all the testing using just a single microsample, rather than having to draw a dedicated tube for each type of test.

So if I got a blood test and my doctor saw the results and wanted other tests done, I wouldn’t have to have more blood drawn?

Exactly. And on their lab form, the physician can write, “If a given result is out of range, run this follow-up test.” And it can all be done immediately, using that same sample.


Some conventional tests, like pH assays, can be done quickly. Others, like those that require culturing bacteria or viruses, can take days or even weeks. Are there some tests that take Theranos longer? Can everything really be turned around in four hours?

Yes, we had to develop assays or test methodologies that would make it possible to accelerate results. So we do not do things like cultures. In the case of a virus or bacteria, traditionally tested using a culture, we measure the DNA of the pathogen instead so we can report results much faster.

Where do you see this making a big difference?

Fertility testing is a good example. Most people pay for it out of pocket, and it can cost as much as $2,000. These tests provide the data you need to figure out someone’s fertility, and some women can’t afford them. Our new fertility panel is going to cost $35. That means women will be able to afford the tests. They’ll be able to better manage the process and take some of the stress out of trying to conceive.

What are you doing to ensure the accuracy of your testing?

The key is minimizing the variability that traditionally contributes to error in the lab process. Ninety-three percent of error is associated with what’s called pre-analytic processing — generally the part of the process where humans do things.

Such as?

Manually centrifuging a sample or how much time elapses before you test the sample, which brings its decay rate into play.

So how do you avoid these potential errors?

There’s no manual handling of the sample, no one is trying to pipette into a Nanotainer, no one is manually processing it. The blood is collected and put into a box that keeps it cold. The very next thing that happens is lab processing, and that’s done with automated devices at our centralized facility with no manual intervention or operation.

How can improved processes actually save lives?

We’ve created a tool for physicians to look at lab-test data over time and see trends. We don’t usually think about lab data this way today. It’s “Are you in range, or are you out of range?” Instead, we like to think, “Where are you going?” If you showed me a single frame from a movie and asked me to tell you the story, I wouldn’t be able to do it. But with many frames, you can start to see the movie unfold.

How else can you use this technology?

Many, many years of work went into making this possible. We started our business working with pharmaceutical companies. Because we made it possible to get data much faster, they could use our infrastructure to run clinical trials. They were also able to run what’s called an adaptive clinical trial, where based on the data, they could change the dosing for a patient in real time or in a premeditated way, as opposed to waiting a long period and then deciding to change a dose.

In the long run, what impact will your technology have?

The dream is to be able to help contribute to the research that’s going on to identify cancer signatures as they change over time, to help intervene early enough to do something about an illness.

Will people become more used to gathering and examining their own health data?

No one thinks of the lab-testing experience as positive. It should be! One way to create that is to help people engage with the data once their physicians release it. You can’t do that if you don’t really understand why you’re getting certain tests done and when you don’t know what the results mean when you get them back.

It drives me crazy when people talk about the scale as an indicator of health, because your weight doesn’t tell you what’s going on at a biochemical level. What’s really exciting is when you can begin to see changes in your lifestyle appear in your blood data. With some diseases, like type 2 diabetes, if people get alerted early they can take steps to avert getting sick. By testing, you can start to understand your body, understand yourself, change your diet, change your lifestyle, and begin to change your life.


How Long To Nap For The Biggest Brain Benefits

„Taking a nap, we’ve seen time and again, is like rebooting your brain.  Everyone likes to get a quick nap in every now and then, but napping may be as much of an art as it is a science. The Wall Street Journal offers recommendations for planning your perfect nap, including how long to nap and when.


The sleep experts in the article say a 10-to-20-minute power nap gives you the best “bang for your buck,” but depending on what you want the nap to do for you, other durations might be ideal.  For a quick boost of alertness, experts say a 10-to-20-minute power nap is adequate for getting back to work in a pinch.


“If you take it longer than 30 minutes, you end up in deep sleep. Have you ever taken a nap and felt worse when you woke up? That’s what’s happening — you’re sleeping too long and you’re going into a stage of sleep that’s very difficult to get out of.” – Dr. Michael Breus


In fact, a study published in PubMed in 2002 found that napping even for 5-10 minutes creates a heightened sense of alertness and increased cognitive ability in comparison to no nap.  So really, you want to be taking a 10-20 minute nap for a quick recharge, or a 60-90 minute nap for a deep sleep rejuvenation.
