A team of researchers in Britain succeeded in employing artificial intelligence techniques to predict the extent to which vision is affected by glaucoma disease in people with this disease, based on the analysis of thousands of images of other patients.
The study, conducted by a team of researchers at the Crab Lab at City Medical Laboratory and University of London, was based on data on more than 24,000 patients with glaucoma, and the result of the study, whose results were published in the scientific journal “Ophthalmology”, indicated that artificial intelligence techniques can To play a role in following up the development of glaucoma in patients, as well as improving the results of research trials in this field.
Glaucoma disease means high eye pressure in a way that may affect the optic nerve, and it affects about 2% of those over the age of forty, and 10% of those over the age of 75, causing millions of visits to hospitals, clinics and medical centers every year.
The Medical Express website, which specializes in medical research, stated that the artificial intelligence system was fed with two types of images that are used to diagnose glaucoma, the first being non-invasive optical tomography images, and the second being infrared reflective rays, where these images are used to examine the retina of patients.
The study aims to assess the ability of the artificial intelligence system to predict the extent to which the vision of glaucoma patients will be affected without the intervention of doctors or specialists. The research team concluded that the system can take advantage of the x-ray image database of other patients in predicting the extent to which the patient’s vision will be affected.
“We used a huge amount of medical data to develop an artificial intelligence system to improve the ability to predict the visual functions of patients, and this new technology could be useful in the development of new treatments for glaucoma,” says researcher David Crab, who specializes in ophthalmology at University College London.