oDocs Eye Care, a New Zealand social enterprise that develops smartphone apps for viewing the retina to aid in the diagnosis of eye diseases, has developed an artificial intelligence framework dubbed MedicMind.
MedicMind enables the development and design of AI without coding, and oDocs has used it to develop a set of algorithms able to detect a range of common eye diseases.
oDocs says MedicMind is capable of detecting eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and retinal vessel disease with an average accuracy of 80 percent.
oDocs director Dr Hong Sheng Chiong said AI such as MedicMind that is capable of triage and making initial predictive diagnosis would help clinicians with limited knowledge and experience in ophthalmology to screen through retinal photographs efficiently.
“This is a pilot study and its performance can be improved with a much larger dataset," he said. "We are calling for all New Zealand clinical and artificial intelligence scientists to join the movement to explore this field.”
oDocs announced MedicMind in March, describing it as a world-first medical platform for medical researchers and clinicians that can generate AI able to auto-diagnose a large range of diseases from a single photograph.
"MedicMind is a cloud-based platform where medical researchers can upload images for their own AI training," it said. "So, if they want to create a medical neural network that can detect glaucoma they can do so with no prior knowledge of coding or programming."
MedicMind spokesman Glenn Linde said: "With MedicMind a smartphone app could use a neural network created with MedicMind trained to detect diseases like glaucoma, melanoma, and diabetic eye disease."
According to Linde and Hong MedicMind originated when the team behind oDocs looked for a way to develop a deep learning algorithm for the detection of diabetic retinopathy.
"We approached a number of universities and private companies. The general answer is either ''We don't know' or it is going to cost a lot," they said. "The frustration led to the creation of MedicMind. A platform that is accessible and affordable for all who would like to experiment with deep learning or do it seriously as a startup."
oDocs has published details of MedicMind in Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology.