16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu, her 15-year-old brother Neeyanth, and her classmate Justin Zhang, recently presented an artificial intelligence system at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence conference in New York City, last month. The system is designed to recognize symptoms of diabetic retinopathy through photographs of eyes and can even give a preliminary diagnosis.

Kavya was inspired to work on this project by her grandfather who was suffering from diabetic retinopathy. This complication of diabetes affects the vision by causing damages to the blood vessels in the retina, eventually leading to complete loss of sight. She wanted to apply her knowledge of computer science and come up with something productive and thus came Eyeagnosis.
 
Eyeagnosis is a smartphone app with a 3D-printed lens that allows a retinal image to be clicked by any phone. It was Eyeagnosis that helped cure her grandfather because of the timely intervention by the doctors.
 
J. Fielding Hejtmancik, an expert in visual diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said that he is extremely excited about the discovery but it does have a long road before it gets integrated into clinics. If she is able to get enough clinical data to prove that Eyeagnosis is credible in any situation then there is a good chance for her. The problem, according to Hejtmancik, is that it’s very cheap and big companies won’t be interested because of less potential of profit margin. But, ironically, it is affordability that medical care industry needs.

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