Artificial intelligence and glaucoma: opportunities and challenges

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to innovation and revolution in many different research fields.AI-assisted diagnostic reading of medical images has achieved substantial progress, whose accuracy has been close to human experts.Glaucoma is the leading reason for irreversible blindness in the world.Early diagnosis and treatment of glaucoma would remarkably improve prognosis.However, early diagnosis of glaucoma is difficult because it depends on comprehensive assessment of intraocular pressure, visual field, changes of retinal nerve fiber layer, etc.Thus, development of AI which could assist diagnosis of glaucoma is faced with great challenges and difficulties.In the future, invention of AI-assisted diagnostic platform of glaucoma based on accumulation of labeled clinical data and training computers to read multimodule test results will create huge social economic benefit and revolutionize diagnosis of glaucoma.