US researchers have developed a digital eye exam using artificial intelligence (AI), providing significantly improved accuracy compared to the classic Snellen chart exam.
Assistant Professor Chris Piech, a Stanford computer scientist, has chronic uveitis and personal experience of numerous eye exams. “I was sitting through all these tests and it was pretty obvious to me that it was terribly inaccurate,” he told Science. So, he decided he wanted to find a way to remove human error from the Snellen exam while improving its accuracy.
Addressing the shortcomings of analogue charts and current digital tests, Piech and his team have now developed the Stanford acuity test (StAT) using a new algorithm based on Bayesian principles* for measuring a patient’s visual acuity. “This algorithm outperforms all prior approaches for this task while also providing reliable, calibrated notions of uncertainty for its final acuity prediction,” said A/Prof Piech.
