Around the world, nearly 1 billion people live with completely avoidable vision loss – a number that is expected to rise in the years ahead. The vast majority live in low- and middle-income countries, where eye care is often hard to come by, and the number of people in need of eye care has long been outpacing the number of trained ophthalmologists. The most sustainable solution to this challenge is to ensure that eye care professionals everywhere have access to quality training so that they can care for patients in their communities.
Dr. Nicolas Jaccard, the principal AI architect at Orbis, will discuss how the global eye care nonprofit has adopted a tech-centric approach to training to scale up its commitment to fighting avoidable blindness and ensure those innovations reach the places that need them most. This approach proved especially critical during the pandemic, when in-person opportunities for training dwindled, almost overnight. Remote surgical mentorship, telemedicine, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and online adaptations of the training traditionally taught on board the organization’s iconic Flying Eye Hospital are just a few of the tools that Orbis is using as it democratizes technology to save sight in areas with the greatest need.
Dr. Jaccard will further dive into Orbis’s award-winning telemedicine platform, Cybersight, which offers AI technology that can detect abnormalities often associated with common eye diseases in seconds, expert advice for complex patient cases, mentoring for local eye care professionals on diagnosis and treatment of their patients, and live surgical demonstrations.
In this session, Dr. Jaccard will explore how Orbis has added artificial intelligence (AI) to its toolkit in the fight against avoidable blindness, the implications of technologies like these on the future of eye care, and how the next steps may or may not be influenced by current events.
