Comments
The latest convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and retinal diagnosis has given a new hope to those at risk of diabetic retinopathy. Sankara Eye Foundation and Singapore-based Leben Care have deployed a comprehensive retina risk assessment software - Netra.AI to enable faster and accurate detection of retinal disorders in large populations with limited healthcare resources.
This cloud-based AI solution is powered by Intel technology and uses deep learning to identify retinal conditions in a short span of time with accuracy matching with human doctors. Diabetic Retinopathy is the major cause for blindness and vision loss in working population.
With a large portion of diabetic population residing in rural India, there is a concern on shortage of trained ophthalmologists to diagnose diabetic retinopathy.
Early diagnosis
Kaushik Murali, President Medical Administration, Quality & Education, Sankara Eye Foundation informed that there is a gap between the onset of disease and it reaching a stage, where it becomes irreversible blindness. “If (by using AI), we are able to diagnose diabetic retinopathy early, we can intervene at that stage and try to either modify the disease so that the retinopathy itself doesn’t progress, or can preserve the limited vision for the patient,” he said.
“We tried to mimic what we were doing as a clinician and be able to look at AI algorithm. That enabled us to get a very high sensitivity (99.7 per cent) and specificity (98.5 per cent) - similar to how ophthalmologist would diagnose diabetic retinopathy,” said Murali. The report is generated within a few minutes thereby helping doctors to provide instant counsel for patients needing to be referred to the hospital.
Netra.AI analyses images from portable, technician-operated fundus camera devices. This helps to get referable DR grading via a cloud-based web portal immediately. The solution uses AI algorithms, developed in collaboration with leading retina experts, with a four-step deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). Netra.AI was validated at Sankara Eye Hospital with internal and external validation images from the patients. The neural network helps detect the stage of the disease and annotate lesions based on pixel density in the fundus images.
Netra.AI can also diagnose other retinal conditions like glaucoma, macular degeneration and other retinal pathologies.This reduces the screening burden on healthcare specialists.
Prakash Mallya, Vice-President & Managing Director – Sales, Marketing and Communications Group, Intel India, commented that the development was a “fantastic complement to ophthalmologist or healthcare specialist who are doing the diagnosis.”
Commenting on the emerging opportunities with AI, Mallya underlined the limitless possibilities ahead. “Due to Covid-19, the remote diagnostics has gone up. We see this trend dramatically continuing, and AI can make a significant impact. That, even beyond healthcare and in areas such aslike agriculture, education, smart cities and many others.”
Globally, Netra.AI has screened 3,293 patients worldwide so far and identified around 812 at-risk patients.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.