The Glaucoma Foundation (TGF) https://glaucomafoundation.org has awarded $250,000 to a research team at the University of California, San Diego https://ucsd.edu to help forecast glaucoma progression and the need for surgical intervention by using AI.
“There is currently no way to forecast glaucoma disease progression to make predictions about whether patients will require incisional surgery or blinded by glaucoma,” reports Elena Stuman, President, CEO of The Glaucoma Foundation. “Also, decisions about target Intraocular Pressure (IOP) are arbitrary and based on clinical consideration of the patient’s age, amount of baseline damage, and baseline IOP”.
Bringing data together to develop multi-modal models in ophthalmology is currently a manual, effort and intensive process. The problem is that ophthalmologists need to log into separate information systems to review clinical data. This data is typically located in EHRs, but ophthalmic imaging data is located in picture archiving and communication systems, which are distinct from EHRs.
Unfortunately, even in patients who are diagnosed and treated for glaucoma, there is currently no way to forecast who will progress, or who will require surgery, so it is vital to identify individuals who are at greatest risk for developing the disease and are at the greatest risk of progressing quickly to vision loss.
“This funding will enable research on how to provide the data and expertise to not only develop a generalizable AI model to predict who needs surgery and who will progress, but also the infrastructure to use in a randomized clinical trial of AI guided glaucoma management”, said PI Linda Zangwill, PhD, Professor in the Viterbi Family Department of Ophthalmology at UC San Diego.