Common eye diseases (age-related macular degeneration [AMD], glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy [DR], myopia) remain challenging areas to predict risk and response to treatment. This can mean that high-risk patients lose vision despite excellent care and monitoring while low-risk patients suffer unnecessary side-effects. Importantly this also impacts our over-stretched NHS.
Using data analysis and artificial intelligence (AI), we will identify which patients are at the highest risk of blindness and predict how each person might respond to treatments. These systems can then be used in specialist centres and also in the wider community (e.g. high street optometrists), meaning that more people from diverse populations will benefit.
Aims
Disease management
Use innovation to address the current need to accurately predict risk or predict treatment response for common eye diseases (AMD, glaucoma, DR, myopia) as well as the patient backlog due to COVID-19 and the increasing number of patients in the ageing population.
Data management
Create further world-leading datasets that are representative of our diverse patient population. We will ensure that this routinely collected data is accessible, protected, and safe allowing large scale discovery.
Multidisciplinary disease prevention
Our efforts will bring together many areas of medicine and health including imaging and genetics. We will understand further biological processes and genetics that can predict disease in a more precise way (personalised medicine). This will lead to patients being able to modify risks to prevent disease or further effects of disease.
Theme co – leads
Prof.
Anthony Khawaja
View academic profile
Prof.
Paul Foster
View academic profile
Translational Data Science
Predicting and treating the most common eye diseases remains challenging
Genetics and A I can I dentify patients at the highest risk of blindness and predict how each person might respond to treatments
We are creating large, world-leading datasets representative of our diverse population
These datasets will be used to improve diagnosis and treatment of common eye diseases
They may also support using eye imaging to assess risk of health conditions beyond the eye, including cardiovascular disease
N I H R Moorfields Biomedical Research Centre
Spotlight story
Unleashing the potential of big data in ophthalmology
UK Biobank is an internationally recognised research platform that provides the global scientific community with the tools to identify previously unrecognised causes of a broad range of life-threatening and disabling illnesses.
