Posts tagged health

Facebook’s Photo Description Tool For The Visually Impaired

According to Facebook, there are nearly 300 million visually impaired people around the world. If these people use smart phones, they will be able to hear the explanation of the image on the screen. Before the update in the operating system, the smart phones only voiced the “photograph” word and who shared it.

In the first stage, the photo descriptions will be limited to 100 words so the users will not hear much detail. Visually impaired users will hear a sentence like “there are three people, smiling, outside” but the AI will not say that these people are also eating and drinking.

Facebook is taking things slow so as to avoid any possible embarrassment. Last year, Google’s search engine identified a black couple as gorillas and the company had to apologize for that.

People at Facebook say that they will improve their technology in time and it will be possible to make more precise descriptions. They are even aiming to answer the user questions about the images.

In the announcement, they say: “Each step taken in object recognition technology will increase accessibility so that we will reach more people. When people connect to each other, we will be able to achieve extraordinary things not only personally but also as a society.”

For now, the first version of the program is limited to phones with IOS. The next step will be bringing this technology to Android phones. The company is planning to implement this technology to internet browsers in near future. Not only on the website but also through different applications, the estimated number of photos shared daily is 2 billion.

A New AI algorithm Can Detect Eye Diseases By Examining a Clean Image Of The Eye

Google has been working on important AI projects lately and according to a recent announcement, they have implemented a new algorithm to detect the eye disease “diabetic retinopathy” which can even cause blindness.

Research has been started in the medical world to determine the success rate of this algorithm. However, the doctors do not rush to trust an AI like this yet. If the algorithm improves and its accuracy rate rises, it will be one of the most important tools that can be used in the medical world.

Artificial Intelligence Can Detect Skin Cancer

Researchers from Stanford University in USA and Cancer Research UK in England, revealed that AI can detect skin cancer as well as a specialist via photographs. The AI that can detect skin cancer is developed based on the Google software which can recognize pictures of cats and dogs. After scanning 129.540 photographs with this software, it was observed that the type of skin cancer in the photos can de identified.

After that, the AI was taught to mark the most common skin cancer as “carcinoma” and the deadliest one as “melanoma.” Following that, the results were compared to the findings of 21 oncology experts.

As a result of this comparison, it was seen that the diagnosis accuracy of the AI was nearly equal to that of oncology experts’. The researchers of Stanford University stated that the outcome of this study is “exciting” and this AI will also be tested in clinical studies. Researchers of Cancer Research UK also stated that, this technology can be a quite useful tool for doctors. Experts say that the AI is a revolutionary invention for the health sector and everyone can turn their smartphones into a cancer detector.

The results of the study were published in “Nature” magazine.