This is the second feature in a six-part series that is looking at how AI is changing medical research and treatments.

Terry Quinn was only in his teens when he was diagnosed with diabetes. In some ways he rebelled against the label and frequent tests, not wanting to feel different.

His biggest fear was of someday needing to have his foot amputated. Vision loss, another possible complication of diabetes, wasn’t really on his radar. “I never thought I’d lose my sight,” says Quinn, who lives in West Yorkshire.

But one day he noticed bleeding in his eye. Doctors told him he had diabetic retinopathy: diabetes-related damage to blood vessels in the retinas. This required laser treatments and then injections.

Eventually the treatments weren’t enough to prevent the deterioration of his vision. He would hurt his shoulder walking into lampposts. He couldn’t make out his son’s face. And he had to give up driving.

“I felt pathetic. I felt like this shadow of a man that couldn’t do anything,” he remembers.

One thing that helped him climb out of his despair was the support of the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, which connected him with a black Labrador named Spencer. “He saved my life,” says Quinn, who is now a fundraiser for Guide Dogs.Advertisement

In the UK the NHS invites patients for diabetic eye screening every one or two years.

US guidelines are that every adult with type 2 diabetes should be screened at diagnosis of diabetes, and then annually if there are no issues. Yet for many people, that doesn’t happen in practice.

“There’s very clear evidence that screening prevents vision loss,” says Roomasa Channa, a retina specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.

In the US barriers include cost, communication and convenience. Dr Channa believes that making the tests easier to access would help patients.

To screen for diabetic retinopathy health professionals take pictures of the rear interior wall of the eye, known as the fundus.

Currently, interpreting fundus images manually is “a lot of repetitive work”, Dr Channa says.

But some think that artificial intelligence (AI) could speed up the process and make it cheaper.

Diabetic retinopathy develops in fairly clear stages, which means that AI can be trained to pick it up.

In some cases, AI could decide whether a referral to an eye specialist is needed, or work in tandem with human image graders.

Source: https://www.bbc.com