Development of LuxIA, a Cloud-Based AI Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Tool Using a Single Color Fundus Image

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the leading cause of vision impairment in working-age adults. Automated screening can increase DR detection at early stages at relatively low costs. We developed and evaluated a cloud-based screening tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI), the LuxIA algorithm, to detect DR from a single fundus image.

Color fundus images that were previously graded by expert readers were collected from the Canarian Health Service (Retisalud) and used to train LuxIA, a deep-learning-based algorithm for the detection of more than mild DR. The algorithm was deployed in the Discovery cloud platform to evaluate each test set. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve were computed using a bootstrapping method to evaluate the algorithm performance and compared through different publicly available datasets. A usability test was performed to assess the integration into a clinical tool.

Three separate datasets, Messidor-2, APTOS, and a holdout set from Retisalud were evaluated. Mean sensitivity and specificity with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) reached for these three datasets were 0.901 (0.901-0.902) and 0.955 (0.955-0.956), 0.995 (0.995-0.995) and 0.821 (0.821-0.823), and 0.911 (0.907-0.912) and 0.880 (0.879-0.880), respectively. The usability test confirmed the successful integration of LuxIA into Discovery.

Clinical data were used to train the deep-learning-based algorithm LuxIA to an expert-level performance. The whole process (image uploading and analysis) was integrated into the cloud-based platform Discovery, allowing more patients to have access to expert-level screening tools.

Using the cloud-based LuxIA tool as part of a screening program may give diabetic patients greater access to specialist-level decisions, without the need for consultation.