AI assisted retinal scan spots Parkinson’s early

Researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology identified markers of Parkinson’s in optical coherence tomography (OCT) by using artificial intelligence (AI).

The study, which was published in Neurology, analysed two large data sets and, in both, found markers that indicated the presence of Parkinson’s disease in patients, on average, seven years before clinical presentation.

Siegfried Wagner, principal investigator of the study, said: ‘I continue to be amazed by what we can discover through eye scans. While we are not yet ready to predict whether an individual will develop Parkinson’s, we hope that this method could soon become a pre-screening tool for people at risk of disease.