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IN TOUCH – Brewdog and Deep Mind

TX:Ìý 21.08.2018Ìý 2040-2100Ìý

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý KEVIN CORE

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White

Good evening.Ìý Tonight, the brewers ordered to compensate a worker who’s losing his sight over his dismissal. ÌýAnd the unexpected compensations of a sultry summer night.

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Lambert

Hovering by the back door the slight breeze feels pleasant against my bare skin and the garden beckons like a pool of cool refreshing water inviting me to take the plunge.

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White

Also tonight, the research which has caused an eye surgeon’s jaw to drop…

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Keane

So, the accuracy of the algorithm was about 94% and that was on a par or maybe even slightly better than a number of human retinal specialists at Moorfields Eye Hospital.

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White

More about the role artificial intelligence may play in saving sight later in the programme.

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But first, one of the most successful pioneers of the craft beer revival has been ordered to pay compensation to a worker who’s losing his sight.

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James Ross worked in the packaging department of Brewdog’s headquarters near Aberdeen. He was dismissed because it was believed he could no longer do his job safely. ÌýBut in a majority decision an employment tribunal ruled that the brewery had failed to offer him the chance of reasonable adaptations to his job that might have allowed him to carry on working for them. ÌýThe tribunal also expressed astonishment that a company with around 800 workers should appear ignorant of its responsibilities under the Equalities Act, to try to keep disabled workers in their jobs if possible. ÌýJames was awarded just over £12,000 to compensate him for lack of reasonable adjustments and injury to his feelings.

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Tom Walker has been telling me more about the case.

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Walker

James Ross had a packaging job in Brewdog in the company’s Aberdeenshire brewery when he reported deteriorating eyesight to his bosses in January of last year.Ìý The tribunal heard that the company decided he couldn’t continue with that packaging role.Ìý They said they’d offered an alternative job at the site because they wanted to prioritise the safety of the team.

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White

Tell us a bit about Brewdog – who are they, what do they do?

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Walker

It’s a very trendy brewery with modern smart designs on the bottles.Ìý They very much rode the explosion in popularity of craft ale and it has 46 bars around the world.

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White

Now the tribunal heard that the RNIB in Scotland had actually visited the site.Ìý Can you tell us a bit about that and what they found?

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Walker

One RNIB employment advisor had been to the brewery and recommended a number of changes that would allow James to keep working.Ìý A second advisor wrote a report which said he felt that if they could have ended James’ employment there and then they would have done so.Ìý The tribunal expressed concerns about the lack of knowledge of Brewdog employees dealing with these matters.

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White

So, what did Brewdog have to say?

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Walker

Well they said it was a difficult matter and they said it was also a difficult matter for the tribunal panel because it was split over the outcome.Ìý They said they worked with James to find an alternative suitable role where his safety wouldn’t be compromised and that they ended up in the position where they had to balance James’ wishes with the best interests of the team around him.Ìý They regretted that an agreement couldn’t be reached but also said they had a moral responsibility to prioritise the safety of their team.

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White

Tom Walker thanks.

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Well listening to that was Ian Brown of RNIB Scotland. ÌýAs you heard Tom say they did visit the company to offer advice both to James Ross and to Brewdog. ÌýIan told me what a person who begins to lose their sight while working ought to be able to expect.

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Brown

Employers, Peter, actually do have obligations under the Equality Act of 2010 to make best efforts to try and retain an employee either in their job or make best efforts to find them alternative work.Ìý The problem often is employer misperceptions of what sight loss means.Ìý A few years ago, a survey by the Department for Work and Pensions of employers found that 92% - 92% believed it was either difficult or impossible to employ someone with an impaired vision.Ìý Now when that survey asked them what their idea of a blind worker was it was someone who could see absolutely nothing, virtually always had a guide dog, they had misperceptions about oh I wouldn’t get insurance because the person would be a fire risk they couldn’t see where the fire exits are.Ìý All this kind of stuff which is – it’s not remotely accurate.

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White

And I believe in this case concerns were expressed at the tribunal about the level of knowledge about visual impairment in the company.

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Brown

Yes, and I think it’s still pretty widespread actually.Ìý We know, in Scotland alone, there’s school teachers, senior civil servants, financial analysts, broadcast journalists dare I say and even astrophysicists who have got, in some cases, really quite serious sight loss but their employer has gone that extra few inches to adapt the workplace.Ìý And sometimes it can be fairly simple things.Ìý One IT lecturer who was partly sighted all the university he worked at in Dundee had to do was change the office environment with the lighting and some of the colour scheme, something as simple as that helped him retain his job.Ìý

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White

Now James has received some compensation in this case.Ìý What advice, though, would you give to perhaps somebody who is losing their sight and is in a company at the moment?

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Brown

I think the first thing I’d do is ask for something in writing.Ìý You or your trade union representative, if you have one.Ìý Remind the employer that they do have obligations under the Equality Act of 2010 not just in recruitment of people with disabilities but the retention of people with disabilities, who acquire disabilities – such as sight loss – the employer must give good reasons why they’re saying your job might be under threat.

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White

And I suppose one of the problems is that perhaps there is a – almost a knee jerk reaction, maybe sometimes on the part of people who themselves are losing their sight, that it’s going to mean that you can’t do their job, which might be a hasty thing to think.

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Brown

I’m sure it is and again we can help, we have sight loss advisory services that can talk with people in confidence, tell them – reassure them – that sight loss doesn’t necessarily mean the end of your life as you know it, that with today’s aids and equipment, with training, in many cases you can still do the job you’re doing.Ìý We know of many cases, in some cases quite high-powered professional jobs.

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White

Ian Brown of RNIB Scotland.

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Now, Radio 4 weather guru Louise Lear told us this morning that the latest bout of sultry weather covering much of the UK could be gone by the weekend. ÌýGood news for many, but, rather to his surprise not for In Touch columnist Mike Lambert.

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Lambert

Tired of fidgeting I abandon all hope of sleep, slip on shorts and t-shirt and trying not to wake my wife tiptoe towards the bedroom door.Ìý All I can think about is getting outside to catch any faint breath of wind.Ìý Hovering by the backdoor the slight breeze feels pleasant against my bare skin and the garden beckons like a pool of cool refreshing water inviting me to take the plunge.Ìý Striding across the patio I feel too late the pressure of something under my foot and hear the splintering crack of a snail.Ìý In the quiet sunless garden molluscs are on the move, traversing the dry Saharan wastes of my patio in search of fresh oases and new pot plants to plunder.Ìý Only for this one the game is up.

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Fishing for my hearing aids I pop them in and turn them up to maximum.Ìý Five years ago, when I was prescribed hearing aids, I didn’t think much of the idea.Ìý Blind and going deaf?Ìý Great.Ìý But now I think they’re wonderful.Ìý Sometimes sitting next to a noisy crisp eater on a train I can turn them down to zero or as now use them to magnify every little secret sound in my midnight garden.Ìý I’ve no idea what time it is but judging by the empty skies and the absence of trains thundering between London and Cambridge it’s dead of night.Ìý And such silence throws any slight disturbance into sharp relief.Ìý In the cool quiet air, the garden feels its most serene and resplendent.Ìý From the flower bed are jasmines pumping out its exotic perfume.Ìý I sit on a low wall, still damp from that evening sprinkler, and pass my hands through the overhanging foliage.Ìý Now they’re wet the leaves more readily their structural beauty to my inquisitive fingers.Ìý Running my hand down a fern frond I recognise its exquisite geometry – a giant feather made of countless sub-feathers all gently tilted like the slats on a venetian blind.Ìý

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My reverie is rudely interrupted by a sudden eruption of sound.Ìý Way down at the bottom of the garden there’s a clattering of fence panels and a splintering of wood, followed by a soft thud, a fox has just entered the garden.Ìý I feel annoyed, intruded upon and maybe a little bit scared.Ìý Does it see me sitting here?Ìý Will it work out I’m blind?Ìý Feeling vulnerable I get to my feet, glare in the direction of the noise and give my best attempt at a low territorial growl.Ìý Fortunately, it seems to work as the fox continues its noisy progress over the opposite fence and forages off down the hill.Ìý From the pond comes a familiar slurp of one of my koi, hoovering down some floating scrap of food.Ìý I imagine the giant fish suspended in the cool water with just enough starlight to reveal the silhouette of a struggling insect.Ìý

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While the city sleeps my garden is a hive of activity.Ìý A gust of wind passes over the surface of the pond and for the first time I feel a tiny bit chilly, like it might be nice to go back indoors.Ìý Maybe I’ll give my hands a good scrub, make myself another final cup of tea and join the rest of my species in sleep.

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White

Mike Lambert. And we’d love to hear your unexpected compensations for lack of sight.

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Now AI, or artificial intelligence, seems to be dominating the news at the moment. ÌýOnly yesterday we heard it could be more disruptive than the industrial revolution as a potential threat to jobs. ÌýBut there’s good news too, contained in the results of a study which says AI may be about to revolutionise the speed and efficiency with which eye disease can be diagnosed. The study was a collaboration between Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and Deep Mind which is part of Google.

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Well I’ve been talking to the man who described the findings as jaw-dropping. ÌýDr Pearse Keane is an ophthalmic consultant at Moorfields.

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Keane

What we’ve been doing is applying a technique called deep learning to these high-resolution scans called OCT scans, which stands for Optical Coherence Tomography and we’ve taught the algorithm how to diagnose and identify the commonest retinal diseases that can cause blindness.

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White

And what did it show?

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Keane

What we’ve really been astounded at the results is that the algorithm became as good as world leading specialists, retinal specialists, at Moorfields Eye Hospital, at diagnosing the common cause of retinal blindness.

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White

And can you give us an indication of the extent to which it achieved accuracy?

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Keane

What it was able to do was look at these OCT scans and assess more than 50 different retinal diseases and give a referral decision and make a diagnosis on those scans.Ìý So, the accuracy of the algorithm was about 94% for identifying the most urgent diagnoses and that was on a par, or maybe even slightly better, than a number of human retinal specialists at Moorfields Eye Hospital.

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White

You’ve described this result as jaw-dropping, can you explain why?

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Keane

On the one hand, I expected good results because Deep Mind are arguably the world’s leading artificial intelligence company and I always knew that this was a problem that was very amenable to the application of AI.Ìý On the other hand, though, it really was quite literally jaw-dropping when we saw just how good the results were because the algorithm performs on a par with retinal specialists at Moorfields, some of whom have more than 20 years of experience looking at these scans.

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White

Does it not slightly worry you that actually the machine can do what you’ve been doing as a professional for years?

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Keane

No, no, emphatically no.Ìý I think that this is only one small aspect of my job as an ophthalmic surgeon.Ìý I don’t think that we’ll ever encounter a situation where a patient receives an injection in their eye or receives surgery on their eye without a human being in the loop to actually make the final diagnosis and to bring together the entire clinical picture for that patient.

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White

Just explain – I mean you’ve said already that this can do this with a number of eye conditions, can you give me examples?

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Keane

At the moment it’s restricted to sight threatening diseases affecting the retina, so the nerve tissue at the back of the eye.Ìý So, the most common examples of that would be conditions like Age Related Macular Degeneration or AMD, Diabetic Macular Oedema but then a whole range of other less common diseases, things like blocked blood vessels affecting the retina, swelling of the retina due to uveitis and inflammatory disease and as I say a range of other conditions.

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White

What effects are you saying this will have because as you’ve described these macular diseases do cause the major amount of blindness in this country?

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Keane

This will be able to be used in hospitalised services on the NHS to try to flag those patients with the most severe urgently sight threatening diseases to allow them to be seen and treated at the earliest possible point because all of the evidence that we have suggests that earlier detection leads to earlier treatment leads to better outcomes for these patients.

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White

And what’s happening at the moment, as far as seeing people in time is concerned?

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Keane

The reality is that unfortunately people are waiting for their appointments in the clinic and often they’re irreversibly losing sight while they wait for their appointments.Ìý For just one condition of Age Related Macular Degeneration we audited the number of referrals that we receive and so in 2016 Moorfields Eye Hospital received about 7,000 referrals as possible Age Related Macular Degeneration but only 800 of those cases actually had the disease and so that puts enormous pressure on our services to try and get those patients seen quickly.Ìý Now for that particular condition the Royal College of Ophthalmologists states that those patients should be seen and treated within two weeks.Ìý Now the reality is that – and this is not just for Moorfields or the NHS but all around the world – that often patients are not seen and treated within that two-week time and they irreversibly lose some of their sight because of those delays.

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White

There have been worries expressed that this will risk giving your personal health data to a large tech company, in this case Google, what safeguards will there be that such information won’t be shared?

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Keane

Once this algorithm has been developed it doesn’t really require further information to be effective.Ìý It’s not a question that your own personal data has to be then given to a company outside the NHS for it to give the correct answers.

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White

When do you think we might see diagnoses routinely made by AI – I mean specifically in the eye?

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Keane

I should say that I am someone who is an optimist for life in general I would say and so I think that this is coming soon.Ìý I would say that my best bet would be within five years we will see this in routine clinical practice.Ìý So, this is something that is going to happen soon, this is not something that’s on the distant horizon – you know 10 years or more from now.

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White

Dr Pearse Keane.

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And by the way if you’re wondering just how fast Deep Mind can work, it can analyse 7,000 retinal scans in minutes.

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And finally, as regular In Touch listeners will know it’s been a rough couple of years for the RNIB, four out of five years in deficit culminating this spring in the resignation of their chief executive over the safeguarding of pupils at one of the schools it was responsible for in Coventry. Well the RNIB has been preparing a strategy for dealing with its problems and it’s now agreed to talk to In Touch about it. Ìý

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We’d like you to add your questions to ours about how the RNIB should be run in future. You can call our action line on 0800 044 044 for 24 hours after the programme, you can email In Touch@bbc.co.uk or click on contact us on our website. ÌýAnd you can also get a podcast of tonight’s programme from there and earlier editions as well.Ìý That’s it, from me Peter White, Producer Kevin Core and the rest of the team, goodbye.