近年来随着人口老龄化的发展、人群用眼方式的改变，现有的眼科医疗资源正越来越难以满足日渐增长的医疗需求，亟需新型的诊疗模式予以补足。眼科人工智能作为眼科领域的新兴元素，在眼病的筛查诊断中发展迅速，主要表现为“眼部图像数据+人工智能”的模式。近年来，随着该模式在白内障、青光眼、糖尿病性视网膜病变(diabetic retinopathy，DR)等常见病中研究的深入，相关技术日渐成熟，表现出了较大的应用优势与应用前景，部分技术甚至成功转化并被逐渐应用于临床。眼科诊疗向智慧医学模式的过渡，有望缓解日益增长的医疗需求与紧缺的医疗资源之间的矛盾，从而提高整体的医疗服务水平。
The development of population aging and changes in the way people use their eyes over the recent years have increasingly challenged the existing ophthalmic medical resources to meet the growing medical needs, thus urgently calling for a novel diagnostic and treatment mode. Despite its status as an emerging sector in ophthalmology, ophthalmic artificial intelligence has developed rapidly in the screening and diagnosis of eye diseases, as can be seen in practices adopting the “eye imaging data + AI” mode. In recent years, with the intensified research on this mode with respect to common diseases such as cataract, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy, relevant technologies have grown increasingly mature, presenting undeniable application superiority and prospects. Some of the relevant technical achievements have also been successfully transformed for practical usage, and are gradually being applied to clinical practices. Ophthalmic diagnosis and treatment are transitioning toward the era of intelligent medical services, which are expected to reduce the contradictions between the growing medical needs and the shortage of medical resources, as well as ultimately improve the overall experience of medical services.
Background: Research innovations inoculardisease screening, diagnosis, and management have been boosted by deep learning (DL) in the last decade. To assess historical research trends and current advances, we conducted an artifcial intelligence (AI)–human hybrid analysis of publications on DL in ophthalmology.
Methods: All DL-related articles in ophthalmology, which were published between 2012 and 2022 from Web of Science, were included. 500 high-impact articles annotated with key research information were used to fne-tune alarge language models (LLM) for reviewing medical literature and extracting information. After verifying the LLM's accuracy in extracting diseases and imaging modalities, we analyzed trend of DL in ophthalmology with 2 535 articles.
Results: Researchers using LLM for literature analysis were 70% (p= 0.000 1) faster than those who did not, while achieving comparable accuracy (97% versus 98%, p = 0.768 1). The field of DL in ophthalmology has grown 116% annually, paralleling trends of the broader DL domain. The publications focused mainly on diabetic retinopathy (p = 0.000 3), glaucoma (p = 0.001 1), and age-related macular diseases (p = 0.000 1) using retinal fundus photographs (FP, p = 0.001 5) and optical coherence tomography (OCT, p = 0.000 1). DL studies utilizing multimodal images have been growing, with FP and OCT combined being the most frequent. Among the 500 high-impact articles, laboratory studies constituted the majority at 65.3%. Notably, a discernible decline in model accuracy was observed when categorizing by study design, notwithstanding its statistical insignificance. Furthermore, 43 publicly available ocular image datasets were summarized.
Conclusion: This study has characterized the landscape of publications on DL in ophthalmology, by identifying the trends and breakthroughs among research topics and the fast-growing areas. This study provides an efcient framework for combined AI–human analysis to comprehensively assess the current status and future trends in the feld.
Background: Research innovations inoculardisease screening, diagnosis, and management have been boosted by deep learning (DL) in the last decade. To assess historical research trends and current advances, we conducted an artifcial intelligence (AI)–human hybrid analysis of publications on DL in ophthalmology.
Methods: All DL-related articles in ophthalmology, which were published between 2012 and 2022 from Web of Science, were included. 500 high-impact articles annotated with key research information were used to fne-tune alarge language models (LLM) for reviewing medical literature and extracting information. After verifying the LLM's accuracy in extracting diseases and imaging modalities, we analyzed trend of DL in ophthalmology with 2 535 articles.
Results: Researchers using LLM for literature analysis were 70% (p = 0.000 1) faster than those who did not, while achieving comparable accuracy (97% versus 98%, p = 0.768 1). The field of DL in ophthalmology has grown 116% annually, paralleling trends of the broader DL domain. The publications focused mainly on diabetic retinopathy (p = 0.000 3), glaucoma (p = 0.001 1), and age-related macular diseases (p = 0.000 1) using retinal fundus photographs (FP, p = 0.001 5) and optical coherence tomography (OCT, p = 0.000 1). DL studies utilizing multimodal images have been growing, with FP and OCT combined being the most frequent. Among the 500 high-impact articles, laboratory studies constituted the majority at 65.3%. Notably, a discernible decline in model accuracy was observed when categorizing by study design, notwithstanding its statistical insignificance. Furthermore, 43 publicly available ocular image datasets were summarized.
Conclusion: This study has characterized the landscape of publications on DL in ophthalmology, by identifying the trends and breakthroughs among research topics and the fast-growing areas. This study provides an efcient framework for combined AI–human analysis to comprehensively assess the current status and future trends in the feld.
目的：评估白内障人工智能辅助诊断系统在社区筛查中的应用效果。方法：采用前瞻性观察性研究方法对白内障人工辅助诊断系统的应用效果进行分析，结合远程医疗的模式，由社区卫生人员对居民进行病史采集、视力检查和裂隙灯眼前节检查等，将数据上传至云平台，由白内障人工智能辅助诊断系统和人类医生依次进行白内障评估。结果：受检人群中男性所占比例为35.7%，年龄中位数为66岁，裂隙灯眼前节照片有98.7%的图像质量合格。该白内障人工智能辅助诊断系统在外部验证集中检出重度白内障的曲线下面积为0.915。在人类医生建议转诊的病例中，有80.3%也由人工智能系统给出了相同的建议。结论：该白内障人工智能辅助诊断系统在白内障社区筛查的应用中具有较好的可行性和准确性，为开展社区筛查疾病提供了参考依据。
Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence-assisted diagnostic system for cataract screening in community. Methods: A prospective observational study was carried out based on a telemedicine platform. Patient history, medical records and anterior ocular segment images were collected and transmitted from community healthcare centers to Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center for evaluation by both ophthalmologists and artificial intelligence-assisted cataract diagnostic system. Results: Of all enumerated subjects, 35.7% were male and the median age was 66 years old. Of all enumerated slit-lamp images, 98.7% met the requirement of acceptable quality. This artificial intelligence-assisted diagnostic system achieved an AUC of 0.915 for detection of severe cataracts in the external validation dataset. For subjects who were advised to be referred to tertiary hospitals by doctors, 80.3% of them received the same suggestion from this artificial intelligence-assisted diagnostic system.Conclusion: This artificial intelligence-assisted cataract diagnostic system showed high applicability and accuracy in community-based cataract screening and could be a potential model of care in community-based disease screening.
