Eyes are the windows to the soul, as William Shakespeare once wrote. But they are also windows to your body’s overall health, and routine eye exams can help protect your body overall health and even save your life. Yes, it is true because eyes are often the place where early signs of serious medical conditions affecting your body can be detected.

Ophthalmologists may be now able to detect every disease of the body including early signs of heart disease with the help of scanning retina of the eyes. AIIMS Bhopal is preparing to buy many such devices, through which information about the diseases can be obtained by scanning the retina.

 

It will also reduce the need for CT scan and X-ray. This will be possible with artificial intelligence (AI). Executive Director of AIIMS Bhopal Professor Dr Ajay Singh has sent a proposal to the Government to bring AI in AIIMS. After this, work will be done on installing the set-up of artificial intelligence. According to the information received from the AIIMS management, a system has been developed with AI that doctors can identify diseases at the right time. It will work only on the basis of software. AI systems can provide insights on things other than diabetic retinopathy. Apart from this, it can also be ascertained from the eye scan that how old the person is, what is the biological sex, whether he/she smokes or not. Along with this, the retina scan can also tell whether he/she is likely to have a heart attack in the future.

 

This technique is currently being used for diabetic retinopathy in eyes at Sankara Netralaya, Chennai. With the help of Google, it is being run as a pilot project. Inspired by this, an action plan is being prepared to bring this technology to AIIMS, Bhopal, where the number of patients suffering from different diseases of retina is around 50 everyday. In such a situation, there are about 1500 such patients in a month, who have problems related to retina. Professor Dr Ajay Singh, Executive Director, AIIMS Bhopal, said that we are working to bring AI in AIIMS and a proposal has also been sent to the government regarding this. With the AI, it will be easy to identify diseases in patients. Now it is also being used in some places. We will getinformation about their results from there also.