RETFound, one of the first AI foundation models in health care, and the first in ophthalmology, was developed using millions of eye scans from the NHS. The research team are making the system open-source: freely available to use by any institution worldwide, to act as a cornerstone for global efforts to detect and treat blindness using AI.
Senior author Professor Pearse Keane said,"This is another big step towards using AI to reinvent thefor the 21st century, both in the U.K. and globally. We show several exemplar conditions where RETFound can be used, but it has the potential to be developed further for hundreds of other sight-threatening eye diseases that we haven't yet explored.
Taking a comparable approach with eye images in a world-first, RETFound has been trained on millions of retinal scans to create a model that can be adapted for potentially limitless uses. RETFound could help improve diagnosis of some of the most debilitating eye diseases, including diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, and predict systemic diseases such as Parkinson's, stroke and heart failure. Identifyingissues through the eyes is an emerging science called"oculomics"—a term coined in 2020 by Professor Alastair Denniston, one of the paper's co-authors. The eye is a"window" into our overall health, providing a non-invasive look at the nervous system.