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| A peek into your body’s future |
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As
the famous saying goes, the eyes are the windows to
the soul. But your peepers may be revealing more about
you than your thoughts and feelings. Doctors are now
working out how your eyes can provide a glimpse at your
health conditions as well.
A group of Singaporean doctors and computer research scientists
are currently working on groundbreaking ophthalmology
research that will enable the prediction of diseases simply
by looking at images of the eye.
Because the eye is the only place where you can actually
see blood vessels directly, doctors say that it is possible
to foresee conditions such as stroke, diabetes, heart
attack, heart disease, high blood pressure and kidney
disease by analysing photographs of the retina and other
parts of the eye.
The implications are critical: For example, if a doctor
can tell if a patient is likely to get a heart attack,
he can send the patient for early screening and save his
life.
But hold rushing off to get your eyes checked —
it will take some years before accurate predictions can
be made.
In February 2007, a large team of Singaporean doctors,
computer research scientists and other researchers from
several organisations — Singapore Eye Research Institute,
National University of Singapore (NUS); Agency for Science,
Technology and Research’s (A*STAR) Institute for
Infocomm Research (I2R); Singapore General Hospital (SGH)
and the University of Melbourne, Australia — received
a $990,000 grant from the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium
under A*STAR for their project entitled “Singapore
Retinal Image Archival and Analysis Network for Disease
Prediction”.
This research group is Asia’s first to put together
a large collection of eye images for the purpose of predicting
cardiovascular and eye diseases. The group already has
more than 10,000 eye images of young and old Chinese,
Malays and Indians.
The computer research scientists aim to develop a tool
that can analyse bulk volumes of eye images swiftly and
precisely. They are now studying the features of the eye
images to determine what can and needs to be measured.
The research group aims to build a world-class storage
and network system and have a prototype of the computer-aided
diagnostic tool up and running in three years.
Expectations of the project are high. Said Dr Lim Joo
Hwee, Research Scientist from I2R: “We’re
very excited because now we have a large volume of retinal
images for computer-based analysis and learning. Doctors
are committed to share their time with us. And we have
some resources in terms of funding and people. We really
hope we can build something useful for the doctors, which
in turn will benefit the patient in the long run.”
A project involving so many agencies is bound to present
challenges in terms
of managing human resources, logistics, operations and
more. But without
the joint efforts of all the different parties involved,
principal investigator Dr Tai
E-Shyong, who is also Consultant Endocrinologist at SGH
and Clinician Scientist with Singapore Health Services,
thinks the research “would take 20 years and might
never get done!”
Sharing his hopes for the project, Dr Tai said: “We
hope it’ll never finish. We hope it’ll lead
to the next one. That’s the very nature of research
— you find things, but you always leave a question.
And you just go on to do the
next thing.”
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Doctors and computer
research scientists hope to predict diseases
by
looking at eye images. |
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by Challenge Editorial Team
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