AI and Diabetes Team up!

Are you a diabetic nerd like me?   Well if you are, and if you are reading these you at least probably have a CGM that is helping you on your journey, then there is some good news.   I was just reading an article on Science Daily, I will link it below, and was really excited to see this new FDA approved a method of diabetic screening.  I will say that my wife works in a Retina Surgical Center, and she is the one that takes a lot of these photographs of the eye, so maybe I just get jazzed to see how close this stuff hits home.

There is a team of researchers at the University of Iowa working on detecting diabetic retinopathy without humans interpreting the data.  I actually work in an AI company right now, so before anyone starts out with AI is taking jobs, and there is no need for this, let me tell you what real AI researchers look at.   First and foremost, the reputable AI researchers are looking for the match of a market where there are extensive “task” related jobs that are either prone to human error or just not being done due to lack of time.  This isn’t about not seeing a specialized and trusting a computer to make medical decisions for you, this is about the ability to let a machine do heavy computational exercises on data, photography in this instance, where it can be running in the background on thousands of images that are done daily that the doctor or staff might not be looking for something specific.  As with any AI, the power is with the data points.  The more data these researchers can get, the more effective it will be.

According to the article, about 24,000 people in the US only lose their sight due to retinopathy each year.  Early detection has proved to be 95% effective in reducing the risk of blindness.  There is still a lot to be done, but the stamp by the FDA is a huge milestone for these researchers trying to help you and me know about our conditions as early as possible and give our Providers the tools to adjust our diabetic plans.

If you have a chance to opt-in for studies like this, you are helping the millions of others that are out there with pre-diabetes or diabetes that don’t even know about it.

Check out the full article here: