Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology, Bangalore, which has been involved in paediatric community eye outreach programmes for over 25 years, has helped evolve a unique tele-medicine software which allows screening of rural and semi-urban infants for a potentially blinding condition called Retinopathy of pre-maturity along with other common conditions including ocular cancers.

The institute has helped provide the access of this software on the iPhone. The development is said to help in reducing the blindness burden of the country.

“Retinopathy of pre-maturity is the leading cause of preventable infant blindness worldwide. In India, over 8 per cent of 27 million births each year are at risk of this potentially blinding condition. Roughly if 100 ‘at-risk’ infants are screened, 15 to 20 per cent 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,” said Dr Anand Vinekar, Project co-ordinator & Paediatric Retinal Surgeon, Narayana Nethralaya.

“Since we began two years ago in seven districts of Karnataka, we have successfully treated over 150 infants and screened over 1500, but we used the ‘store and forward’ technology that was slow and did not solve security and storage issues,” he added.

“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 led to the development of this new technology,” said Dr Bhujang Shetty, chairman, Narayana Nethralaya.

The i2iTeleSolutions is the the collaborating software partner. Its Care TeleOphthalmology software connects retinopathy specialists to pre mature infants in the farthest corners of the country. Its Teleopthalmology Application running on Apple’s iphone is a new era of telemedicine allowing doctors see clear images of the retina and report findings anywhere, anytime, realtime. “The new pilot will run for 36 months at which time we expect TeleROP to be deployed on a much broader scale across the country and soon in other countries too,” said Sham Banerji, CEO of i2iTeleSolutions.