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Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), researchers have developed a rapid test to identify which people with glaucoma are at risk of rapid progression to blindness.
A new test can detect glaucoma progression 18 months earlier than the current gold standard method, said the study published in the Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics.
Glaucoma, the world’s leading cause of irreversible blindness, affects more than 60 million people, expected to double by 2040 as the world’s population ages.
Vision loss in glaucoma is caused by the death of cells in the retina, in the back of the eye.
“Being able to diagnose glaucoma at an earlier stage and predicting its course of progression could help people maintain their eyesight, as treatment is more successful if given early in the disease,” said the first author of the study, Eduardo Normando, from Imperial. College of London.
The test, called DARC (Detection of Apoptotic Retinal Cells), involves injecting a fluorescent dye into the bloodstream (through the arm) that binds to retinal cells and illuminates those that are undergoing apoptosis, a form of death. programmed cell phone.
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Damaged cells appear bright white when viewed on eye exams: the more damaged cells are detected, the higher the DARC count will be.
One challenge in evaluating eye diseases is that specialists often disagree when viewing the same scans, which is why researchers have incorporated an AI algorithm into their method.
In the DARC phase II clinical trial, AI was used to evaluate 60 of the study participants: 20 with glaucoma and 40 healthy control subjects.
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The AI was initially trained by analyzing the retinal scans (after dye injection) of healthy control participants.
AI was tested in glaucoma patients.
Participants in the AI study were followed up 18 months after the main trial period to see if their eye health had deteriorated.
The researchers were able to accurately predict progressive glaucomatous damage 18 months earlier than observed with current gold standard OCT retinal imaging technology, as each patient with a DARC count above a certain threshold was found to have progressive glaucoma at follow-up. .
“These results are very promising, as they show that DARC could be used as a biomarker when combined with the AI-assisted algorithm,” said lead researcher Francesca Cordeiro of the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London (UCL).
