Artificial intelligence in assessing progression of age-related macular degeneration.

Journal: Eye (London, England)
Published Date:

Abstract

The human population is steadily growing with increased life expectancy, impacting the prevalence of age-dependent diseases, including age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Health care systems are confronted with an increasing burden with rising patient numbers accompanied by ongoing developments of therapeutic approaches. Concurrent advances in imaging modalities provide eye care professionals with a large amount of data for each patient. Furthermore, with continuous progress in therapeutics, there is an unmet need for reliable structural and functional biomarkers in clinical trials and practice to optimize personalized patient care and evaluate individual responses to treatment. A fast and objective solution is Artificial intelligence (AI), which has revolutionized assessment of AMD in all disease stages. Reliable and validated AI-algorithms can aid to overcome the growing number of patients, visits and necessary treatments as well as maximize the benefits of multimodal imaging in clinical trials. Therefore, there are ongoing efforts to develop and validate automated algorithms to unlock more information from datasets allowing automated assessment of disease activity and disease progression. This review aims to present selected AI algorithms, their development, applications and challenges regarding assessment and prediction of AMD progression.

Authors

  • Sophie Frank-Publig
    Laboratory for Ophthalmic Image Analysis, Department of Ophthalmology and Optometry, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
  • Klaudia Birner
    Laboratory for Ophthalmic Image Analysis, Department of Ophthalmology and Optometry, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
  • Sophie Riedl
    Christian Doppler Laboratory for Ophthalmic Image Analysis, Department of Ophthalmology, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
  • Gregor S Reiter
    Department of Ophthalmology and Optometry, Medical University of Vienna, Währinger Gürtel 18-20, 1090, Vienna, Austria. gregor.reiter@meduniwien.ac.at.
  • Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth
    Christian Doppler Laboratory for Ophthalmic Image Analysis (OPTIMA), Department of Ophthalmology, Medical University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 23, 1090 Vienna, Austria.