People have been living with COVID-19 for almost two years since the outbreak. And the most accurate test for COVID-19 on the market is the nasopharyngeal test, but did you ever think that the eyes could also detect coronavirus?
Fudan University in Shanghai, China, has successfully developed COVID-19 risk detection technology! You can know whether you have COVID-19 by measuring your eyeball.
Using a smartphone to take a photo of an eye, we can use the technology to determine whether a person has COVID-19 in three seconds, with screening in Japan claiming to be 99 per cent accurate and easy to do at almost no cost. The technology is officially available free of charge in China.
According to Chinese media reports, the theories related to ocular diagnosis in Chinese medicine and the ocular surface microcirculation theory in the West, AI medical imaging technology based on the ocular surface and fundus retina for disease diagnosis is becoming increasingly mature. Inspired by this, the research team assembled a team of experts in machine learning, clinical medicine and business to conduct a “global cross-regional and cross-ethnic CLINICAL trial of COVID-19 eye detection”.
Fudan University officially launched the research project in February 2020. At present, the average sensitivity and specificity of clinical trials in many world regions have reached more than 85%. The average specificity and sensitivity of East Asians are the highest at 97%.
Dr Qiang Sun, a chief data engineer of the project, pointed out, “In Japan, we cooperate with local nucleic acid testing companies to conduct risk-assisted screening. As long as we screen high-risk nucleic acid, almost 99% or more test positive.”
At present, the project team has completed the construction of the eye detection development platform, providing API or SDK carrying services for various types of disease detection for all intelligent hardware and supporting software enterprises with civil cameras. Among them, free demo and free API for non-commercial purposes (subject to developer review) of COVID-19 testing are only permanently open to the public in China, and the testing process strictly complies with domestic and foreign data compliance and privacy security.
