Open Source Research in Retinal Imaging

What is EyesFirst?

EyesFirst is an open source research project that is applying image processing and data analysis techniques to retinal images to detect early signs of multiple diseases. Key aspects of this project include:

Establishing an open community standard for retinal image and health metadata.

Developing an open source information sharing platform to improve public access to de-identified clinical and research datasets.

Promoting the development of open source image processing algorithms and data analysis tools.

Providing a basis for future longitudinal studies to investigate novel predictors for multiple diseases.

Why should you care?

The expected benefits of EyesFirst are two-fold:

From a research perspective, to improve sharing of longitudinal datasets of retinal images and structured health metadata, leading to accelerated development of automated diagnostics and discovery of novel disease predictors.

From a clinical perspective, to enable diagnosis of certain diseases earlier in their course. Earlier diagnosis may mitigate some of the most serious impacts of disease to include an improved quality of life as well as decreased cost of disease management.

How can you participate?

EyesFirst is actively seeking collaborators to define a standard retinal image metadata specification and prototype the image registration and image usage process for the database of retinal images. If interested, please contact us.