Artificial Intelligence (AI) like a Sherlock Holmes of sight: hunting for the first signs of glaucoma to identify the disease as soon as possible and intervene early to slow down its progression and the consequent damages that can even lead to blindness.
The specialists of the Italian Eye Center of Brescia, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and the IRCCS Fondazione Bietti of Rome are working with this objective thanks to an international project financed by the Swiss foundation Velux Stiftung which aims at the creation of an automatic contactless system for screening and early diagnosis of angle-closure glaucoma.
Through the Velux project: NACA estimator (No Contact Anterior Chamber Angle), researchers are working to create an algorithm that could one day also allow outpatient screening and remote monitoring.
These are the applications of Artificial Intelligence in ophthalmology that are starting to give the first results thanks to Deep Learning (DL) whose potential in the medical field, to date, has been applied, for example, to the evaluation of tumors, the detection of atrial fibrillation and the time of stroke onset.
Glaucoma is a very common disease.
According to the WHO, around 80 million people in the world are affected and around 25 million are those who have lost all or part of their sight.
In Italy alone there are about a million glaucomatosis, but one in two people does not know they are affected.
"Artificial Intelligence is a computer system capable of performing activities that normally require human intelligence, such as the detection of glaucoma-induced alterations at the level of the optic nerve head, or the progression of visual field damage", explains Luciano Quaranta, scientific director of the Italian Eye Center, underlining that "early diagnosis and preventive management of degeneration is essential".