iPhone turns eye-phone in tele-medicine

BANGALORE, INDIA: Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology, Bangalore, today entered into a collaboration with i2iTelesolution, a tele-medicine service and software provider, to introduce a new tele-medicine solution, which would facilitate remote and live screening of rural and semi urban infants for some eye conditions.

The institute, which has been involved in pediatric community eye outreach programs for over 25 years, mainly intends to utilize the software in the areas of screening for a potentially blinding condition called Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) along with other common conditions including ocular cancers.

Doctors or health professionals can access this software from wherever in the world via an iPhone, and review the high quality pictures of infant retinas and related medical data of a patient filed from a rural screening center.

The doctors can then upload their examination results via the same system, which the technician at the center can access, get printed out and give to the patient in a rural village, sparing the patient from the need of having to wait in long queues to meet the doctor.

Dr Anand Vinekar, project coordinator and pediatric retinal surgeon, Narayana Nethralaya, Bangalore, said that in India, over 8 per cent of 27 million births each year were at risk of ROP. “Roughly if 100 ‘at-risk’ infants are screened, 15-20 may require treatment that can prevent blindness. This requires a fast and efficient system of screening infants especially in the peripheral rural areas where expertise is lacking,” he said.

He further said that since they began ROP screen program two years ago in seven districts of Karnataka, they have successfully treated over 150 infants and screened over 1500, but they were sending data and images via the ‘store and forward’ technology (like emails) that was slow and did not solve security and storage issues. And he thinks this new application would help fasten and simplify the process.

Under Narayana Nethralaya Institute's ROP program, a doctor and an image technician can attend the patients in rural center to get the medical data and image before uploading them on to a dedicated server, which the concerned pediatric ophthalmology experts can access and review.

“With the experience of over 56,000 images of infant retinas in our database, we required a dedicated web-based software with progressive viewing to speedily allow access to our experts at the base hospital. This quest lead to the development of this new technology,” said Dr Bhujang Shetty, chairman of Narayana Nethralaya.

“The i2i Teleopthalmology Application running on Apple’s iPhone ushers in a new era of biomedicine letting doctors see amazingly clear images of the retina and report findings anywhere, anytime, realtime,” said Sham Banerji, CEO of i2iTeleSolutions.

The solution, dubbed 'CARE TeleOphthalmology software', is being implemented on a pilot basis and will run for 36 months at which time TeleROP is expected to be deployed on a much broader scale across the country and soon in other countries linking them in this unique way, Banerji hoped.

He also said that he saw $3.6 billion market for tele-medicine globally and of which, he targets to acquire 60 per cent.