Problem / Objective:

Telangana government was concerned about the high number of blindness and vision impairment cases occurred in children due to a lack of trained and skilled ophthalmologists. To prevent blindness, there was a need for better tools to monitor these cases and detect the ones with a higher risk.

There are 4 significant causes of vision impairment in children under 18. They are defects at birth, diseases, deficiency conditions and developmental delays including disabilities. Various nutritional deficiencies and developmental delays affect at least 10% of the children.

Solution / Approach:

In November 2016, the Telangana Government signed an MOU with Microsoft India. Under the MoU, Microsoft India conducted a cloud-based, advanced analytics pilot project to understand the health screening program of school students carried out by mobile health teams. The pilot project helped the government to unlock actionable insights by highlighting major conditions, and vision impairment was the most prevalent health issue among children. The government adopted Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE) to address the issue which helped to make early interventions and prevention of instances of refractive errors.

In December 2016, Microsoft launched MINE (a part of Microsoft AI network for healthcare) in collaboration with L V Prasad Eye Institute. It focuses on diverse datasets of patients across geographies for creating machine learning predictive models for vision impairment and eye diseases. The system developed by Microsoft predicts whether a LASIK, cataract or other types of surgery is going to be successful on a given patient or not. Also, it can predict how a patient’s refractive error is going to progress over time. The model was trained on a dataset of 335,799 instances from 176,037 patients aged up to 25 years to predict the progression of refractive errors for a period of two years. 

Impact / Implementation:

The Microsoft model is currently integrated and being validated in EMR systems at 174 centers of L V Prasad Eye Institute in India. It is being scaled to a full-fledged solution that will enable Telangana’s health officials to gain valuable insights to tackle health conditions covered under the Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram under the National Health Mission in children across the state. Microsoft is set to deploy its leading cloud platform technology – Cortana Intelligence Suite, for advanced analytics and to build AI models on eye care.