AI-powered virtual eye: perspective, challenges and opportunities
This is a visionary perspective for advancing ophthalmic healthcare and research through AI integration.
The authors propose a 'virtual eye' platform using interconnected AI foundation models to create a high-fidelity digital replica of the human eye, aiming to revolutionize personalized ophthalmic care and accelerate ocular research.
We envision the "virtual eye" as a next-generation, AI-powered platform that uses interconnected foundation models to simulate the eye's intricate structure and biological function across all scales. Advances in AI, imaging, and multiomics provide a fertile ground for constructing a universal, high-fidelity digital replica of the human eye. This perspective traces the evolution from early mechanistic and rule-based models to contemporary AI-driven approaches, integrating in a unified model with multimodal, multiscale, dynamic predictive capabilities and embedded feedback mechanisms. We propose a development roadmap emphasizing the roles of large-scale multimodal datasets, generative AI, foundation models, agent-based architectures, and interactive interfaces. Despite challenges in interpretability, ethics, data processing and evaluation, the virtual eye holds the potential to revolutionize personalized ophthalmic care and accelerate research into ocular health and disease.