Artificial intelligence for eye care

Technological developments in ophthalmic imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) create new possibilities for diagnostics in eye care. AI has already been applied in ophthalmic diabetes care. AI-systems currently detect diabetic retinopathy in general practice with a high sensitivity and specificity. AI-systems for the screening, monitoring and treatment of age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma are promising and are still being developed. AI-algorithms, however, only perform tasks for which they have been specifically trained and highly depend on the data and reference-standard that were used to train the system in identifying a certain abnormality or disease. How the data and the gold standard were established and determined, influences the performance of the algorithm. Furthermore, interpretability of deep learning algorithms is still an ongoing issue. By highlighting on images the areas that were critical for the decision of the algorithm, users can gain more insight into how algorithms come to a particular result.