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形式的可预防失明。像印度这样的国家，有大量人口因白内障和角膜疾病等急性疾病而面临失明风险(估计有近1900万人)，也有大量人口因青光眼、AMD和糖尿病视网膜病变(估计有近2100万人)等慢性疾病而面临失明风险。据估计，与去年同期相比，负担增加了近18%。印度的专科医生与患者的比例为1：8300，这使得有必要实施分散的眼睛健康筛查计划。这种模式需要一种价格实惠、易于使用的便携式成像设备，该设备支持远程医疗，以便远程捕获图像，并需要一个自动化软件，使非专家能够根据对临床相关病理疾病的敏感检测对患者进行分类。这一应用程序寻求建立世界上第一个全自动、便携式疾病检测和分选设备，用于眼睛健康筛查--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.