Diabetes is a metabolic disease that causes high blood sugar. The hormone insulin moves sugar from the blood into your cells to be stored or used for energy. Diabetes can happen when your body either doesn’t make enough insulin or can’t effectively use the insulin it makes. Untreated high blood sugar from diabetes can damage your eyes. People with diabetes can have an eye disease called diabetic retinopathy. This happens when high blood sugar levels damage blood vessels in the retina. These blood vessels will be blocked and leaky. Sometimes abnormal new blood vessels will grow on the retina. All of these changes can make your vision become worse.

Types of diabetic retinopathy

1. Non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy is the early stage of the disease. The blood vessels in the retina are weakened and there may be fluid leaking into the retina which may lead to swelling of the retina.
2. Proliferative diabetic retinopathy is the advanced stage of the disease. The blood vessels might rupture and the blood may leak into the vitreous cavity, this causes patients to have acute blurry vision.

Artificial intelligence (AI) fastest way in detecting diabetic retinopathy

Previously, diabetic retinopathy was analysed and graded manually, therefore it usually takes around an hour to identify the findings. Next, these patients diagnosed as diabetic retinopathy will go through a second round of grading to ensure that the diagnosis is accurate. Artificial intelligence(AI) programme is a new technology which can deliver diagnosis within just a couple of minutes and the accuracy for AI systems is about 90% because it eliminates human inconsistencies when analysing data.

How does artificial intelligence (AI) work?

It uses selena+ software which looks out for symptoms such as bleeding,swelling and microaneurysms, which would appear as tiny red lesions in retina photography. After uploading the retinal image, the software will compare it against the dataset it has been trained on, which comprises nearly 500,000 retinal images of patients with the diseases.

OasisEye Specialists is the first Eye Centre to initiate the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for diabetic eye screening in Malaysia. OasisEye is ahead in providing premier eye care to its patients and collecting data to further strengthen the current AI algorithms or develop new ones.

How to prevent blindness

Diabetic retinopathy is asymptomatic at an early stage. Therefore, patients with diabetic are advised to have an annual eye screening. Early detection and treatment can prevent vision loss.