Automatic Ocular Disease Screening and Monitoring Using a Hybrid Cloud System
The maturity of healthcare IoT technology which connects medical devices and applications to healthcare IT systems through internet has driven the rapid growth of healthcare. In recent years, great effort has been spent to improve ocular disease screening and diagnosis using advanced image and data analysis techniques. However, the developed systems are not widely used because they are usually offline and separated from medical devices. In this paper, we introduce a platform that connects medical devices, patients, ophthalmologists, and intelligent ocular disease analysis systems through a cloud-based system. The platform is designed in a hybrid cloud pattern to offer both easy accessibility and enhanced security. The retinal fundus images and patients' personal data can be uploaded to the public cloud tier through multiple channels including retinal fundus cameras, web portals, mobile applications and APIs. The data will be transferred to the private cloud tier where automatic analysis and assessment will be performed using advanced pattern classification algorithms. Subsequently, the analysis report will be made available in the public tier so that patients can access their own report through mobile applications or web portals. Furthermore, patients with high risk of having ocular diseases will be referred to ophthalmologists. The platform helps to form an integrated ecosystem that enables an efficient and cost-effective way of ocular disease screening and monitoring, allowing early disease detection and intervention.