AI for Eye Disease Detection

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📊 Did You Know?

Eye care infrastructure in Africa is yet to be developed and faces various challenges such as the shortage of financial and human resources and low community awareness. Consequently, “one in every six blind people globally lives in Africa,” WHO reported. Furthermore, “only 14% of people who need cataract surgery receive it, while more than 80% of people with shortsightedness receive no treatment.”

📖 The Story

Who, When, and Where — Context

In 2016, Google DeepMind’s applied AI research team and Moorfields Eye Hospital’s ophthalmologist initiated a research collaboration in the UK.

Why — Challenge

Globally, clinical diagnosis of retinal diseases with eye scans suffers from an overwhelming workload. Eye hospitals do numerous scans daily, but the number of patients is simply too much for the hospital’s limited capacity. Eventually, doctors are unable to see and treat patients as quickly as they should, and people are going blind rapidly.

What and How — Tech Solution

Together with Moorfields Eye Hospital, Google’s DeepMind has developed an AI application that analyzes eye scans and helps doctors decide what care a patient might need. The experimental results show that the AI system performs as good as human experts in assessing and triaging more than 50 different retinal diseases. There have been further assessment and development efforts in the broader “AI in healthcare” context so that the application can be used in a clinical setting.

💡 Key Insights

• 👁️ Diagnostic imaging is bottlenecked by its volume and complexity. AI tools can mitigate this challenge by providing efficient and accurate support to human experts.

• 📜 AI research in the clinical setting requires careful design choices regarding ethics and privacy. These include anonymizing data, preventing patient re-identification, and preparing a path to opt-out.

• 🌍️ Despite the positive research outcomes, the real-world deployment of healthcare AI should not be straightforward. Researchers must overcome the hurdles of eliminating AI biases and ensuring its robustness through large-scale experiments worldwide.

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✅ Try This

Watch the recent BBC news report “Can AI-powered eye scans help identify diseases?” featuring Moorfields Eye Hospital’s search for the future.