EyeAI: AI-Assisted Ocular Disease Detection for Equitable Healthcare Access

TL;DR

EyeAI is an AI system that uses retinal images to detect ocular diseases, aiming to improve access to eye care globally, especially in underserved areas, with promising accuracy and scalability.

Contribution

The paper introduces EyeAI, a novel AI-based platform for ocular disease detection that enhances accessibility and supports remote diagnosis in healthcare.

Findings

Achieved 80% accuracy in detecting ocular diseases

Demonstrated potential for scalable, remote diagnosis

Facilitated equitable healthcare access

Abstract

Ocular disease affects billions of individuals unevenly worldwide. It continues to increase in prevalence with trends of growing populations of diabetic people, increasing life expectancies, decreasing ophthalmologist availability, and rising costs of care. We present EyeAI, a system designed to provide artificial intelligence-assisted detection of ocular diseases, thereby enhancing global health. EyeAI utilizes a convolutional neural network model trained on 1,920 retinal fundus images to automatically diagnose the presence of ocular disease based on a retinal fundus image input through a publicly accessible web-based application. EyeAI performs a binary classification to determine the presence of any of 45 distinct ocular diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, media haze, and optic disc cupping, with an accuracy of 80%, an AUROC of 0.698, and an F1-score of 0.8876. EyeAI addresses barriers to traditional ophthalmologic care by facilitating low-cost, remote, and real-time diagnoses, particularly for equitable access to care in underserved areas and for supporting physicians through a secondary diagnostic opinion. Results demonstrate the potential of EyeAI as a scalable, efficient, and accessible diagnostic tool. Future work will focus on expanding the training dataset to enhance the accuracy of the model further and improve its diagnostic capabilities.