With the increasing coverage and availability of smart phones, the application of realizing intelligent health management has become an emerging research hotspot. The new generation of smart phones can perform health analysis by tracking the step numbers, monitoring heart rate and sleep quality, taking photos and other approaches, thereby becoming a new medical aid tool. With the continuous development of deep learning technology in the field of image processing, intelligent diagnosis based on medical imaging has blossomed in many disciplines, which is expected to completely change the traditional eye diseases diagnosis and treatment mode of hospitals. The conventional diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases often relies on various forms of images, such as slit lamp biological microscope, fundus imaging, optical coherence tomography, etc. As a result, ophthalmology has become one of the fastest growing areas of medical artificial intelligence (AI). The deployment of ophthalmological AI diagnosis and treatment system on smart phones is expected to improve the diagnostic efficiency and screening coverage to relieve the strain of medical resources, which has a great development prospect. This review focuses on the prevention and telemedicine progress of eye diseases based on deep learning and smart phones, taking diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and cataract as examples to describe the specific research, application and prospect of deep learning and smart phones in the management of eye diseases.

Objective: To establish and validate a universal artificial intelligence (AI) platform for collaborative management of cataracts involving multilevel clinical scenarios and explored an AI-based medical referral pattern to improve collaborative efficiency and resource coverage. Methods: The training and validation datasets were derived from the Chinese Medical Alliance for Artificial Intelligence, covering multilevel healthcare facilities and capture modes. The datasets were labelled using a three step strategy: (1)capture mode recognition; (2) cataract diagnosis as a normal lens, cataract or a postoperative eye and (3) detection of referable cataracts with respect to aetiology and severity. Moreover, we integrated the cataract AI agent with a real-world multilevel referral pattern involving self-monitoring at home, primary healthcare and specialised hospital services. Results: The universal AI platform and multilevel collaborative pattern showed robust diagnostic performance in three-step tasks: (1) capture mode recognition (area under the curve (AUC) 99.28%–99.71%), (2) cataract diagnosis (normal lens, cataract or postoperative eye with AUCs of 99.82%, 99.96% and 99.93% for mydriatic-slit lamp mode and AUCs >99% for other capture modes) and (3)detection of referable cataracts (AUCs >91% in all tests). In the real-world tertiary referral pattern, the agent suggested 30.3%  of people be ’referred’, substantially increasing the ophthalmologist-to-population service ratio by 10.2-fold compared with the traditional pattern. Conclusions: The universal AI platform and multilevel collaborative pattern showed robust diagnostic performance and effective service for cataracts. The context of our AI-based medical referral pattern will be extended to other common disease conditions and resource-intensive situations.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been applied to analyze clinical big data and images and then make intelligent diagnosis, prediction and treatment decisions. It is gradually becoming an advanced technology to assist clinical and scientific research. Biobank is a platform for collecting clinical information and samples for scientific research, serving as a bridge between clinical and scientific research. It is also an integrated platform of clinical information and scientific research data. However, there are some challenges. First, clinical and laboratory information obtained is incomplete. Additionally, the information among different databases is asymmetric, which seriously impedes the information sharing among different Biobanks. In this article, the specific application scenarios of AI technology and blockchain in the construction of a Biobank were discussed, aiming to pinpoint the core direction of the information construction of an intelligent Biobank in the era of big data.

Background Research innovations on disease screening, diagnosis, and management in ophthalmology have been boosted by deep learning (DL) in the last decade. To assess historical research trends and current advances, we conducted an artificial intelligence (AI)–human hybrid analysis of publications on DL in ophthalmology. Methods All DL-related articles in ophthalmology published between 2012 and 2022 from Web of Science were included. 500 high-impact articles annotated with key research information were used to fine-tune an 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 using 2535 articles. Results Researchers using LLM were 70% (p = 0.0001) faster than those who did not, while achieving comparable accuracy (97% versus 98%, p = 0.7681). The field has grown 116% annually, paralleling trends of the broader DL domain. The publications focused heavily on diabetic retinopathy (p = 0.0003), glaucoma (p = 0.0011), and age-related macular diseases (p = 0.0001) using retinal fundus photographs (FP, p = 0.0015) and optical coherence tomography (OCT, p = 0.0001). DL studies utilizing multimodal images have been growing, with FP and OCT combined being the most frequent. 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 efficient framework for combined AI–human analysis to comprehensively assess the current status and future trends in the field.

Objective: This study was designed to explore its potential value for new medical service model based on the intelligent voice follow-up system and analyze its application effect during the outbreak of COVID-19. The actual effectiveness of this intelligent voice follow-up system applied in the Internet hospital to carry out medical consultation service was discussed. Methods: In this study, an intelligent voice follow up system was developed for postoperative follow-up of children with congenital cataract. First, a well-designed and structured questionnaire contents were developed for postoperative follow-up. Secondly, the intelligent voice follow-up system was deployed. The system would automatically jump to the next follow-up step according to the user’s response, and give appropriate suggestions. Finally, the data of telephone recording, call time, children’s attributes were collected and statistically analyzed. Results: From February 24 to March 15, 2020, 561 families of children with congenital cataract from Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center were recruited by using the intelligent voice follow-up system. The system completed a total of 1 154 calls, of which 561 cases received follow-up data, reaching an average effective call rate of 48.6%. Among 561 cases, 204 (36.4%) thought that the extended time of follow-up visit would affect the recovery of children, while 309 (55.1%) thought that it exerted no effect on the recovery. 360 children (64.2%) achieved good ocular recovery without complications, whereas 169 cases (30.1%) developed ocular symptoms. These include white spots in the pupil area, redness and eye secretions. Statistics of different behavior of children showed that there were 417 (74.3%) children wearing glasses, 135 (24.1%) children did not wear glasses, another 9 (1.6%) children wearing glasses were not clear, often rubbing the eyes of children were more likely to appear redness (20.4%), eye secretions (17.0%) and white spots in the pupil area (6.8%) and other adverse reactions. Conclusion: The intelligent voice follow-up system shows great application potential in clinical follow-up, which can be employed as a new service mode of intelligent medical treatment.

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.

With the change of human lifestyle and overuse of eyes in recent years, the market demand for ophthalmic drugs continues to grow. However, the ocular therapy is still facing the shortage of doctors and drugs. Due to the risk of high cost, long lead time and low success rate, the process of novel ophthalmic drug innovation and iteration is getting slower. As an emerging technology, artificial intelligence is expected to enable the whole process of ophthalmic drug discovery and development, including drug target discovery, compound screening, pharmacokinetic model innovation and clinical trials, thus reducing R&D costs and increase efficiency for ophthalmic drug discovery and development. In addition, with the improvement of big data, hardware calculation and the deep integration of life science and intelligent science, the role of artificial intelligence in ophthalmic drug discovery and development will be significant improved , contributing to achieve the leap from precision to intelligence.

Preoperative routine tests are widely prescribed in clinical settings. However, these tests do not help improving the quality of medical care in low-risk elective surgery. Instead, they are associated with lower efficiency and increasing fees. To improve the efficiency, many regions, institutions, and scholars have attempted to reduce preoperative routine tests without indications through propaganda, education, consensus, and guidelines. Nevertheless, the effects are still highly dependent on the expertise and emphasis of practitioners. Machine learning based on big data provide a new solution with its standardization and automation. Through literature review, we extracted the big data, including demographic features such as sex and age, histories including diagnosis and chronic diseases, and physical examination features such as visual function and body mass index. A total of 34 000 patients undergone ocular surgeries in Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-sen university from 2017 to 2019. Machine learning was adopted to predict the risk of finding abnormalities in chest X-ray examination, with an accuracy of 81.2%. Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve was 0.864. The study could be an early exploration into the field of simplifying preoperative tests by machine learning.

The establishment of standardized data center can promote the accumulation of high-quality data resources and the development of medical artificial intelligence. On the basis of medical big data, medical artificial intelligence systems in different application scenarios can be established and integrated into an intelligent service cloud platform, which improves the management efficiency of intelligent medical systems. This article takes ophthalmology as a prototype to summarize the experience of the establishment of ophthalmic data center and intelligent service cloud platform, aiming to provide reference and guidance for ophthalmology and other specialties to carry out artificial intelligence research, establish data center and build an intelligent service cloud platform.

Exfoliation glaucoma is a category of glaucoma secondary to exfoliation syndrome, which is rarely encountered in clinical practice. We reported 2 cases with deposits of white material on the pupillary border of the iris. Opacity band could be observed surrounding the anterior lens capsule after pupil dilation, and the Sampaolesi line was seen under gonioscope. Understanding the clinical characteristics contribute to improving the diagnosis and treatment of exfoliation glaucoma.