They develop an ‘app’ that allows early detection of eye diseases that cause blindness

July 18 (Portaltic/EP) –

Two students from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) from the university master’s degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics have developed a mobile application capable of detecting in just a few seconds if a person suffers from a hidden disease that causes blindness.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), some 2,200 million people on the planet suffer from some type of visual impairment or blindness and half of those cases could have been avoided through early diagnosis.

To solve this problem, UOC students have devised a project called begIA, which allows, for example, to find out if a glaucoma patient, Diabetic retinopathy or cataracts can lead to a total loss of vision through a selfie.

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) analyzes this photograph and issues a diagnosis that, if positive, channels the person who has undergone it to the specialist that best suits their needs.

Specifically, begIA is based on a neural network algorithm capable of recognizing in a frontal image of the face of the person taken with the mobile, using deep learning techniques, if they have any eye disease.

According to the students who have developed begIA, it arises from a personal experience, after a family member with type 2 diabetes begins to lose a lot of vision and that even led him to stop driving and reading.

“He developed diabetic retinopathy, an eye disease that causes loss of vision and the incidence of which can be reduced through early diagnosis”, commented these creators, Igor García Atutxa and Francisca Villanueva.

In addition to the early diagnosis of ophthalmological diseases, with begIA professionals can carry out medical monitoring from a distance since, once the correct treatment for each patient has been determined, you can continue to see its effectiveness and the evolution of the pathology through these photographs. In this way, the patient avoids traveling to the health center for examination.

From this institution they remember that the early diagnosis of ocular diseases requires an examination of the fundus of the eye, which implies that there must be a specialist in ophthalmology that it has the necessary optical instruments.