A novel artificial intelligence (AI) tool, developed using NHS eye imaging datasets, could transform the efficiency of screening for Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) - a sight-threatening condition affecting a third of the 4.4 million people estimated to have diabetes in the UK.
Researchers at King's College London have used anonymised NHS eye data from over 100,000 people with diabetes to build an AI model that can accurately predict who is at highest risk of sight loss from Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) up to three years in advance.
DR is an eye condition that affects around one in three people with diabetes, and a leading cause of vision loss in working-age adults.
Anyone aged 12 years or older diagnosed with diabetes under the NHS is asked to attend an annual eye check for DR with the NHS Diabetic Eye Screening Program (DESP), which screens around 3.2 million people at a cost of over £85 million pounds per year in England alone.
The AI model could serve as a tool to enable individualised DESP screening by predicting if an individual is at low or high risk of developing DR in one year, two years or three years - a capability that the NHS does not currently have.
In developing the AI model, the researchers used over 1.2 million retinal images from people with diabetes from South East London DESP. To ensure that the model was robust enough to work accurately on a diverse range of individuals, it was validated on a dataset of around 70,000 images from the INSIGHT Health Data Research Hub.
This project shows the enormous value of collating, curating and sharing routinely collected clinical data. It also shows the way ahead, in terms of how AI might move from hype to tangible patient benefit, subject to further clinical studies.
Professor Timothy Jackson PhD, FRCOphth, Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon at King's College Hospital and Professor of Retinal Research at King's College London
It has been a pleasure to work in this clinically driven project that leveraged the cross-cutting capabilities of the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine at King's. Using Artificial Intelligence to predict the incidence of retinal disease due to diabetes has tremendous social and economic prospects. AI can modernise diabetic screening programmes without sacrificing their current ability to prevent sight loss.
Professor Christos Bergeles, Professor of Surgical Robotics at the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King's College London
If implemented, individualised screening would reduce the screening burden for people at low risk of vision loss, while ensuring individuals at a high-risk of vision loss are seen urgently. This approach could save the NHS millions of pounds, and thousands of appointments every year.
The research has been published in Nature Communications Medicine.
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Professor of Surgical Robotics
Professor of Retinal Research and Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon
