Newton Fund - Automated Telemedicine Enabled Screening for Eye Diseases Using an Affordable and Simple to Use Smartphone Based Imaging Device

全世界有近2.85亿人患有视力障碍，其中近90%在发展中国家。80%的人患有一种或多种可预防的失明。像印度这样的国家，由于白内障和角膜疾病等急性疾病，有相当多的人口面临失明风险（估计近1900万），并且由于青光眼，AMD和糖尿病视网膜病变等慢性疾病，有相当多的人口面临失明风险（估计近2100万）。据估计，负担同比增加近18%。印度专科医生与患者的比例较低，为1：8300，因此需要实施分散的眼部健康筛查计划。这种模式需要一个负担得起的，易于使用的，便携式成像设备，是远程医疗启用，允许远程捕获图像，以及自动化软件，允许非专家分流的基础上筛选的敏感检测临床相关的病理病人。该应用旨在建立世界上第一个全自动、便携式疾病检测和分类设备，用于筛查眼睛健康-成本仅为现有桌面技术的一小部分。

There are nearly 285m people worldwide with visual impairments and nearly 90% of this is in developing countries. 80% suffer from one or more forms of preventable blindness. A country like India has a significant population at risk of blindness due to acute conditions such as cataract and corneal diseases (estimated at nearly 19m) and a significant population at risk for blindness due to chronic conditions like glaucoma, AMD and diabetic retinopathy (estimated at nearly 21m). Year-on-year increase in burden is estimated at nearly 18%.The low specialist doctor-patient ratio in India of 1:8300, necessitates the need to implement programmes for decentralised screening for eye health. Such models require an affordable, easy to use, portable imaging device that is telemedicine-enabled to allow for remote capture of images, together with an automated software that allows non-specialists to triage patients screened based on the sensitive detection of clinically relevantpathologies. This application seeks to build the world's first fully automated, portable disease detection and triaging device in screening for eye health - at a fraction of the cost of existing desktop technologies.