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Digital health technologies have been in use for many years in a wide spectrum of healthcare scenarios. This narrative review outlines the current use and the future strategies and significance of digital health technologies in modern healthcare applications. It covers the current state of the scientific field (delineating major strengths, limitations, and applications) and envisions the future impact of relevant emerging key technologies. Furthermore, we attempt to provide recommendations for innovative approaches that would accelerate and benefit the research, translation and utilization of digital health technologies.

Myopia as an uncorrected visual impairment is recognized as a global public health issue with an increasing burden on health-care systems. Moreover, high myopia increases one's risk of developing pathologic myopia, which can lead to irreversible visual impairment. Thus, increased resources are needed for the early identification of complications, timely intervention to prevent myopia progression, and treatment of complications. Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies may have the potential to tackle these unmet needs through automated detection for screening and risk stratification, individualized prediction, and prognostication of myopia progression. AI applications in myopia for children and adults have been developed for the detection, diagnosis, and prediction of progression. Novel AI technologies, including multimodal AI, explainable AI, federated learning, automated machine learning, and blockchain, may further improve prediction performance, safety, accessibility, and also circumvent concerns of explainability. Digital technology advancements include digital therapeutics, self-monitoring devices, virtual reality or augmented reality technology, and wearable devices – which provide possible avenues for monitoring myopia progression and control. However, there are challenges in the implementation of these technologies, which include requirements for specific infrastructure and resources, demonstrating clinically acceptable performance and safety of data management. Nonetheless, this remains an evolving field with the potential to address the growing global burden of myopia.

BackgroundMany artificial intelligence (AI) studies have focused on development of AI models, novel techniques, and reporting guidelines. However, little is understood about clinicians' perspectives of AI applications in medical fields including ophthalmology, particularly in light of recent regulatory guidelines. The aim for this study was to evaluate the perspectives of ophthalmologists regarding AI in 4 major eye conditions: diabetic retinopathy (DR), glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and cataract.MethodsThis was a multi-national survey of ophthalmologists between March 1st, 2020 to February 29th, 2021 disseminated via the major global ophthalmology societies. The survey was designed based on microsystem, mesosystem and macrosystem questions, and the software as a medical device (SaMD) regulatory framework chaired by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Factors associated with AI adoption for ophthalmology analyzed with multivariable logistic regression random forest machine learning.ResultsOne thousand one hundred seventy-six ophthalmologists from 70 countries participated with a response rate ranging from 78.8 to 85.8% per question. Ophthalmologists were more willing to use AI as clinical assistive tools (88.1%, n = 890/1,010) especially those with over 20 years' experience (OR 3.70, 95% CI: 1.10–12.5, p = 0.035), as compared to clinical decision support tools (78.8%, n = 796/1,010) or diagnostic tools (64.5%, n = 651). A majority of Ophthalmologists felt that AI is most relevant to DR (78.2%), followed by glaucoma (70.7%), AMD (66.8%), and cataract (51.4%) detection. Many participants were confident their roles will not be replaced (68.2%, n = 632/927), and felt COVID-19 catalyzed willingness to adopt AI (80.9%, n = 750/927). Common barriers to implementation include medical liability from errors (72.5%, n = 672/927) whereas enablers include improving access (94.5%, n = 876/927). Machine learning modeling predicted acceptance from participant demographics with moderate to high accuracy, and area under the receiver operating curves of 0.63–0.83.ConclusionOphthalmologists are receptive to adopting AI as assistive tools for DR, glaucoma, and AMD. Furthermore, ML is a useful method that can be applied to evaluate predictive factors on clinical qualitative questionnaires. This study outlines actionable insights for future research and facilitation interventions to drive adoption and operationalization of AI tools for Ophthalmology.

Abstract By 2040, ~100 million people will have glaucoma. To date, there are a lack of high-efficiency glaucoma diagnostic tools based on visual fields (VFs). Herein, we develop and evaluate the performance of ‘iGlaucoma’, a smartphone application-based deep learning system (DLS) in detecting glaucomatous VF changes. A total of 1,614,808 data points of 10,784 VFs (5542 patients) from seven centers in China were included in this study, divided over two phases. In Phase I, 1,581,060 data points from 10,135 VFs of 5105 patients were included to train (8424 VFs), validate (598 VFs) and test (3 independent test sets—200, 406, 507 samples) the diagnostic performance of the DLS. In Phase II, using the same DLS, iGlaucoma cloud-based application further tested on 33,748 data points from 649 VFs of 437 patients from three glaucoma clinics. With reference to three experienced expert glaucomatologists, the diagnostic performance (area under curve [AUC], sensitivity and specificity) of the DLS and six ophthalmologists were evaluated in detecting glaucoma. In Phase I, the DLS outperformed all six ophthalmologists in the three test sets (AUC of 0.834–0.877, with a sensitivity of 0.831–0.922 and a specificity of 0.676–0.709). In Phase II, iGlaucoma had 0.99 accuracy in recognizing different patterns in pattern deviation probability plots region, with corresponding AUC, sensitivity and specificity of 0.966 (0.953–0.979), 0.954 (0.930–0.977), and 0.873 (0.838–0.908), respectively. The ‘iGlaucoma’ is a clinically effective glaucoma diagnostic tool to detect glaucoma from humphrey VFs, although the target population will need to be carefully identified with glaucoma expertise input.

Abstract Background Effective screening is a desirable method for the early detection and successful treatment for diabetic retinopathy, and fundus photography is currently the dominant medium for retinal imaging due to its convenience and accessibility. Manual screening using fundus photographs has however involved considerable costs for patients, clinicians and national health systems, which has limited its application particularly in less-developed countries. The advent of artificial intelligence, and in particular deep learning techniques, has however raised the possibility of widespread automated screening. Main text In this review, we first briefly survey major published advances in retinal analysis using artificial intelligence. We take care to separately describe standard multiple-field fundus photography, and the newer modalities of ultra-wide field photography and smartphone-based photography. Finally, we consider several machine learning concepts that have been particularly relevant to the domain and illustrate their usage with extant works. Conclusions In the ophthalmology field, it was demonstrated that deep learning tools for diabetic retinopathy show clinically acceptable diagnostic performance when using colour retinal fundus images. Artificial intelligence models are among the most promising solutions to tackle the burden of diabetic retinopathy management in a comprehensive manner. However, future research is crucial to assess the potential clinical deployment, evaluate the cost-effectiveness of different DL systems in clinical practice and improve clinical acceptance.

Abstract Deep learning (DL) has been shown to be effective in developing diabetic retinopathy (DR) algorithms, possibly tackling financial and manpower challenges hindering implementation of DR screening. However, our systematic review of the literature reveals few studies studied the impact of different factors on these DL algorithms, that are important for clinical deployment in real-world settings. Using 455,491 retinal images, we evaluated two technical and three image-related factors in detection of referable DR. For technical factors, the performances of four DL models (VGGNet, ResNet, DenseNet, Ensemble) and two computational frameworks (Caffe, TensorFlow) were evaluated while for image-related factors, we evaluated image compression levels (reducing image size, 350, 300, 250, 200, 150 KB), number of fields (7-field, 2-field, 1-field) and media clarity (pseudophakic vs phakic). In detection of referable DR, four DL models showed comparable diagnostic performance (AUC 0.936-0.944). To develop the VGGNet model, two computational frameworks had similar AUC (0.936). The DL performance dropped when image size decreased below 250 KB (AUC 0.936, 0.900, p