Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, along with the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Google, Topcon, and the INSIGHT Health Data Research Hub, is supporting the rollout of a mobile AI service for diabetic retinopathy in outback Australia, aiming to tackle inequalities in eye health for rural and Indigenous Australians.
Following a successful one-year pilot and a $5 million AUD grant from the West Australian government, the AI model said to offer “instant point-of-care diagnosis” is set to be rolled out in Pilbara, a region of Western Australia with a population of “just 45,000 in an area almost twice the size of the UK” where access to health services is “extremely limited”.
The RETFound AI foundation model originally developed by researchers at Moorfields, will be used in the next phase of the rollout to help “fine tune the diabetic retinopathy algorithm for Indigenous people”, using local data to enhance its accuracy and enabling the expansion of the AI system to “detect cardiovascular disease from eye scans”.
Pearse Keane, consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, highlighted the “immense potential for medical AI to reduce health inequalities in low-resource settings”, noting the value of the AI system in overcoming challenges relating to “geographic isolation and limited access to health services” in the Australian outback.
Mark Chia, Australian ophthalmologist and part of the Lions Outback Vision team, noted how the collaboration has meant being able to “bring together world-leading data science and medical AI expertise with the experience and ingenuity of eyecare professionals in Australia to develop an original approach to saving sight, and saving lives, in remote parts of the country”.
To learn more about Lions Outback Vision, please click here.
Health tech from Moorfields Eye Hospital
HTN covered the development of the RETFound AI foundation model at Moorfields Eye Hospital and the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology back in 2023, noting how the model was trained using a curated dataset of 1.6 million images from Moorfields Eye Hospital.
Moorfields and UCL also shared their work around using AI to help identify retinopathy of prematurity – the leading cause of childhood blindness. The tool was developed to help identify which at-risk children have retinopathy of prematurity and to improve access to screening. The algorithm was trained on a sample of 7,414 images of the eyes of 1,370 newborns, who had been admitted to the Homerton Hospital, London, and assessed for retinopathy of prematurity by ophthalmologists. The tool was assessed on another 200 images and compared to the assessments of senior ophthalmologists. Researchers then employed the tool on datasets sourced from Brazil, Egypt and the US – with an aim to further validate the efficacy of the technology.
In more recent news from Moorfields, the trust announced this month that it had awarded a £16.7 million EPR contract to Meditech via the NHS LPP Clinical Digital Solutions Framework Agreement. The contract will run from 30 October 2024 for an initial period of ten years, with the option to extend for a further five, making the maximum contract length a total of 15 years.
