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Industry News

21 Mar 2023

AI-powered Eye Disease Detection Solution Set To Transform Healthcare in Australian Communities

examining retinal imagesLions Outback Vision at The Lions Eye Institute has collaborated with Google to find ways to tackle diabetic retinopathy in Indigenous Australian communities. Diabetic retinopathy is a common cause of vision loss in these communities, where it is 14 times more common than in non-Indigenous people. The disease creates lesions in the back of the retina and can lead to blindness. Diabetes is also three to five times more common in the Indigenous population. Early detection and treatment can prevent blindness, but access to doctors and healthcare services can be limited in rural and remote areas.

Through a new collaboration with Google, Lions Outback Vision is researching AI solutions to make screening more accessible and efficient. The goal is to detect eye disease earlier in the patient's journey. As part of this partnership, a study was conducted to validate the performance of Google's AI model in detecting diabetic retinopathy within an Indigenous population in Western Australia. The study was based on anonymised data and conducted in partnership with Derbarl Yerrigan Health Service. The paper was recently published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology and found that the machine learning model performs on par with a retinal specialist.

Validating the model across diverse patient populations is critical to determine the role and potential of this technology in a clinical setting. The model can also help to reduce racial bias in AI models. Around the world, Google's CE-marked AI system is already assisting clinicians and community health workers to screen for diabetic retinopathy and is deployed in India and Thailand. This collaboration has been ongoing for 13 years, and the team is dedicated to finding ways to bridge the equity gap and provide better healthcare services to the Indigenous population.

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