Jennifer Lim, MD: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence in DR Screening

EyeArt is an artificial intelligence system that has been developed and tested to help bridge the gap in screening for diabetic retinopathy. As the numbers of people with diabetes continue to grow, there aren’t enough ophthalmologists and other health care providers to adequately screen for diabetic eye disease.

Jennifer I. Lim, MD, Marion H. Schenk Esq. Chair, Professor of Ophthalmology, and Director of Retina Service at the University of Illinois at Chicago presented the results of a clinical trial of the EyeArt system at the 2019 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) Imaging in the Eye Conference in Vancouver, BC.

Lim told MD Magazine® that the EyeArt system has a “great ability to be useful to detect referable DR [diabetic retinopathy] from non-referable DR and what that really means in the practical sense is that the EyeArt system and this artificial intelligence system is useful in order to help triage patients and screen for diabetic retinopathy.”

She added that her hope that EyeArt will contribute to reducing blindness in this population in the future.

In part 1 of the interview, Lim shared about the growing need for diabetic retinopathy screening as the population of patients with diabetes continues to grow worldwide. Part 2 covered how the EyeArt system was trained and then tested in a clinical trial. Lim delved into the results of the clinical trial in part 3.

What do these results mean for clinical practice?

So, overall if we look at the results of the study we see that the EyeArt system had sufficiently high enough sensitivity, specificity, and great ability to be useful to detect referable DR [diabetic retinopathy] from non-referable DR and what that really means in the practical sense is that the EyeArt system and this artificial intelligence system is useful in order to help triage patients and screen for diabetic retinopathy. Hopefully this will help reduce the burden of patients who need to be screened for diabetic retinopathy, and hopefully in the future contribute to prevention of blindness in these patients.