AI for Good

Chapter 26Screening Premature Infants for Retinopathy of Prematurity in Low-Resource Settings

—Anthony Ortiz, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Guillermo Monteoliva, and Maria Ana Martinez-Castellanos

Executive Summary

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a vision-threatening disorder affecting premature infants. Because of medical advancements, more prematurely born children survive, causing the incidence of ROP to rise. ROP is treatable: pediatric ophthalmologists can use lasers to stop abnormal vascular development that can otherwise lead to retinal detachment, visual impairment, and blindness. Usually, pediatric ophthalmologists are needed to screen for ROP as well as treat it; however, these specialists are exceedingly rare, particularly in low-resource settings.

Here, we describe the development of a three-step process that can be used by lightly trained personnel—who are not pediatric ophthalmologists—to screen premature infants for ROP. Using a smartphone's camera, the trained personnel can capture a video of the infant's retina and upload the video to our application that immediately determines whether the video contains adequate frames of retinal images (so that the videographer can obtain another video, while the patient is there and prepped for videography, if there are no good images). The application then uses the best obtained retinal images to determine the probability that the image indicates ROP and provides that information to a pediatric ophthalmologist for further ...