AI Sight spun out from the University in 2022, with an aim to commercialise a next generation artificial intelligence (AI) system that will revolutionise diabetic eye screening.
Diabetes is a lifelong condition where blood sugar levels are higher than normal. This causes damage to small blood vessels in organs throughout the body, including the eye (diabetic retinopathy), resulting in vision loss and ultimately blindness. Diabetic retinopathy screening to prevent blindness has been recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO). It aims to identify disease at an early enough stage to allow sight saving interventions. However, the number of expert personnel required to operate a screening programme is vast.
In initially applying their technology to diabetic retinopathy, AI Sight combines human expertise and machine judgement to interpret and rank retinal images across disease severity and treatment intervention points, reducing the need for expensive and scarce medical expertise. The technology has been trained on over 1.6 million images to date. It is a highly sensitive and specific, web-based screening system that uniquely measures and displays the level of certainty of every automated image analysis, easily integrated into different healthcare systems and can interpret images from any retinal camera.
The AI system was conceived by academics at the University of Liverpool’s Department of Eye and Vision Science. Members of the research team include Simon Harding, Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology (Chief Medical Officer), David Wong, Professor of Ophthalmology and Chief Scientific Officer, and Dr Mark Johnson (Chief Technical Officer), a machine learning expert currently at the University of Manchester. Joining the team to lead on commercialisation is Dr Steven Powell (Chief Executive Officer), and Mark Thorne (Chief Financial Officer) and Professor Elizabeth Maitland, an expert in international business strategy and healthcare management from the University’s Management School (Chief Strategy Officer). The company has received investment from the University of Liverpool’s Enterprise Investment Fund to provide start-up capital.
Our mission is to take our unique AI approach to image interpretation from the lab bench to the global market, in support of diabetic patients and their clinical teams to ultimately reduce the societal impact of diabetes induced blindness.
Dr Steven Powell, Chief Executive Officer
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