A multi-centre prospective evaluation of THEIA™ to detect diabetic retinopathy (DR) and diabetic macular oedema (DMO) in the New Zealand screening program

Purpose To validate the potential application of THEIA™ as clinical decision making assistant in a national screening program. Methods A total of 900 patients were recruited from either an urban large eye hospital, or a semi-rural optometrist led screening provider, as they were attending their appointment as part of New Zealand Diabetic Eye Screening Programme. The de-identified images were independently graded by three senior specialists, and final results were aggregated using New Zealand grading scheme, which was then converted to referable/non-referable and Healthy/mild/more than mild/sight threatening categories. Results THEIA™ managed to grade all images obtained during the study. Comparing the adjudicated images from the specialist grading team, “ground truth”, with the grading by the AI platform in detecting “sight threatening” disease, at the patient level THEIA™ achieved 100% imageability, 100% [98.49–100.00%] sensitivity and [97.02–99.16%] specificity, and negative predictive value of 100%. In other words, THEIA™ did not miss any patients with “more than mild” or “sight threatening” disease. The level of agreement between the clinicians and the aggregated results was ( k value: 0.9881, 0.9557, and 0.9175), and the level of agreement between THEIA™ and the aggregated labels was ( k value: 0.9515). Conclusion This multi-centre prospective trial showed that THEIA™ did not miss referable disease when screening for diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy. It also had a very high level of granularity in reporting the disease level. As THEIA™ has been tested on a variety of cameras, operating in a range of clinics (rural/urban, ophthalmologist-led\optometrist-led), we believe that it will be a suitable addition to a public diabetic screening program.