Moorfields spin-out Cascader has announced its partnership with Specsavers focused on harnessing the potential of AI innovation to improve patient care in optometry.
Peter Thomas, Moorfields’ CCIO and executive director of digital development, and Giles Edmonds, clinical services director at Specsavers, announced that the partnership is set to explore the best way of implementing cutting-edge AI capabilities into optometry in a video post shared to LinkedIn.
Cascader, a spin-out from Moorfields, UCL and Topcon Health, is focused on building clinical-grade AI for ophthalmology. A mission statement from its website outlines its work to use AI “to enable safe, evidence-based decisions in high-volume, high-risk eye conditions” and to use oculomics for early detection of systemic disease.
Peter shared with HTN during a panel discussion on AI in practice across the NHS that Moorfields has developed a data research platform called INSIGHT, that currently holds around 35 million ophthalmic images, as well as associated diagnostic and metadata, as the biggest bioresource for ophthalmology in the world.
“Recently we made the transition toward trying to turn those projects into products,” Peter elaborated, “like with our spin-out Cascader, which is developing some of that work through to regulated products that can be used in optometry practices.” He spoke of hopes that projects like Cascader will bring “huge amounts of benefit back into the NHS”, highlighting that “whilst it’s early days, we hope to have our first medical device regulated products within 18 months or so”.
In another HTN panel discussion on the move from reactive to proactive care, Peter shared: “Moorfields have the data and the clinical expertise, UCL has the AI expertise, and Topcon Health give us access to imaging devices and cloud based imaging platforms. It’s about forming the right partnerships, and about getting that data across.”
Late last year, teams from Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology announced their development of an AI tool capable of predicting patients at risk of developing retinopathy, following use of a common autoimmune medicatio, said to be widely prescribed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and other autoimmune conditions.
Trained using more than 8,000 eye scans from 409 patients in the US and UK, the HCQuery algorithm works by analysing retinal images captured using optical coherence tomography, a standard part of screening for hydroxychloroquine patients. It correctly identified 100 percent of patients with retinopathy up to 2.74 years earlier than doctors, according to Moorfields, also achieving 91 percent accuracy in ruling out patients without the condition. The algorithm’s development was supported by data infrastructure from Moorfields’ INSIGHT Health Data Research Hub, and the code has been made publicly available on GitHub in order to accelerate its development and encourage further testing.
Wider trend: AI use across NHS Trusts
HTN was joined by Neill Crump, digital strategy director at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, and Lee Rickles, CIO at Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust, to discuss practical steps health and care organisations can take to prepare for AI. Neill and Lee shared details of their current work and their journey to date, best practices, learnings, challenges, and the opportunities that lie ahead.
An automatic AI system developed by Alder Hey clinicians and researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool has received a £1.2 million grant from the NIHR Invention for Innovation programme. The system automates x-ray interpretation, data capture, and monitoring, with an AI algorithm trained on thousands of x-ray images that is capable of locating hip bone outlines and detecting cases where dislocation is beginning to happen. In testing, Alder Hey reports that it has performed similarly to human medical experts in terms of accuracy, whilst taking “a fraction of the time” on the analysis.
HTN also took a deep dive into progress made across the health sector around AI over the last 12 months, sharing notable news stories, webinars, deep dives, and features.
