Ophthalmology since 2017 was the busiest of any medical specialty in the UK National Health Service in terms of clinical appointments. Nearly 10 per cent of all NHS outpatient appointments are related to eye issues. That’s nearly 10 million appointments a year, and that number has increased by more than a third in the past five years.
Between the ages of 18 and 65, diabetic eye disease is the leading cause of blindness. But the population is aging and we are also seeing an increasing prevalence of diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). That is the most common cause of blindness. a recent research in the British journal of ophthalmology estimated that 25.3 percent of people in Europe over the age of 60 have early signs of AMD. In the UK, about 200 people a day also develop a severe form of AMD called wet AMD, which causes blindness due to bleeding at the back of the eye.
Ophthalmologists struggle to see and treat all of these patients. Unfortunately, this means many go blind due to delays in diagnosis and treatment. All the evidence suggests that early detection and treatment equals safe vision.
Technology can reduce these challenges. New eye scanners, called optical coherence tomography (OCT) devices, are being deployed in every optometry practice, such as your local Specsavers or Vision Express. These advanced scanners can take really high-resolution images of the retina in a non-invasive way.
That is promising, but also a challenge. Community optometrists don’t always have the expertise to analyze OCT scans, so they currently overrefer patients to eye hospitals, adding to the burden.
AI can bring leading expertise from places like Moorfields Eye Hospital into the community. In 2018, we published a proof-of-concept in collaboration with DeepMind paper in Nature showing that an AI system can analyze and assess OCT scans for more than 50 retinal diseases, with a level of performance comparable to that of expert ophthalmologists.