Pearse Keane UK

The Future of Retina: From Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to Artificial Medical Intelligence (AMI)

Pearse Keane is Professor of Artificial Medical Intelligence at UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, and a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London. Since 2020, he has been funded by UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) as a Future Leaders Fellow, and in 2023 he became a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator. He is originally from Ireland and received his medical degree from University College Dublin (UCD), graduating in 2002. 

In 2016, he initiated a collaboration between Moorfields Eye Hospital and Google DeepMind, with the aim of developing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for the earlier detection and treatment of retinal disease. In August 2018, the first results of this collaboration were published in the journal, Nature Medicine. In 2023, he led the development of RETFound, the first foundation model in ophthalmology, published in Nature and made available open source. 

In October 2019, he was included on the Evening Standard Progress1000 list of most influential Londoners and in June 2020, he was profiled in The Economist. In 2025, he received the Gabor Medal from the Royal Society in the United Kingdom and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in the United States.