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Alphabet Inc. merges part of its London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind with Google's sister company.
DeepMind said Tuesday that the team that created a mobile app to alert health care providers to hospital patients threatened with deterioration would join the new Google division, called Google Health. The unit is headed by David Feinberg, the former chairman and CEO of Geisinger Health Systems.
Google bought DeepMind, founded in 2012, for £ 400 million in 2014. The following year, the company began working on health care research, ultimately creating a whole division dedicated to the region.
The first product of DeepMind Health, a mobile application called Streams, originally designed to help physicians identify patients at risk of developing acute kidney injury, has been controversial. In July 2017, the United Kingdom's data privacy regulator said that DeepMind's partner in the project, the Royal Free Hospital in London, had illegally granted DeepMind access to 1.6 million patients.
The Royal Free Hospital accepted the results, but said it had to submit the files so that DeepMind could test the security of the application.
In addition to the Royal Free Hospital, DeepMind has agreements with three other hospital trusts from the UK National Health Service to deploy Stream. The company also collaborates with NHS hospitals in search of algorithms to diagnose eye diseases and head and neck cancers from medical images, and collaborates with the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Fighters on an algorithm to predict which patients are at risk of sudden deterioration. of acute kidney injury and other conditions.
According to a DeepMind release, the Streams team and employees working on the clinical evaluation of the algorithms will be transferred to Google Health. Dominic King, a former NHS surgeon who had been clinical director of DeepMind Health, will lead the team in London and the DeepMind Health brand will cease to exist.
Employees who were working on more basic and scientific research – as opposed to manufacturing products from this research – will remain in DeepMind, a company spokesman said.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, described the merger as a positive step. "One of the reasons we have joined forces with Google is the desire to give us the platform to get our technologies to market more quickly around the world," he said in a statement. "The DeepMind research team will continue to lead the way in the application of AI to the broad issues of basic science and medicine research."
Julia Powles, a senior researcher at New York University's Information Law Institute, who criticized DeepMind's work in the health field, called the merger with Google "totally unacceptable" on Twitter. She stated that DeepMind had given repeated assurances that no patient data from her work with NHS hospitals would ever be transferred to Google. "Now, this has announced … exactly that," she tweeted. "This is not transparency, it is the demolition of trust."
First published: Nov. 14, 2018 12:05 PM IST
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