An eyecare foundation model for clinical assistance | Hacker News Reader

An eyecare foundation model for clinical assistance

nature.com

36 pointsjameslk11 comments

Funny story. I have only one eye, and when in public I signify this by wearing a very obvious eye path. Even without the eye patch, my prosthetic eye looks nothing like my functioning eye (by choice).

I went to the optician a few weeks ago in order to get a new pair of glasses who performed the usual tests. She knew full well that I have only one eye, but when testing my functioning eye she handed me the eye occluder to place over my non-functioning eye. I asked her why she was doing this as it served no function but she clearly did not understand the question. It took nearly a full minute for me to explain to her how pointless using this occluder was. It was rewarding to see the veils of habit lift when she finally grokked my point.

As for the article... it seems like a valid application of technology. Relevant to my anecdote, some doctors/diagnosticians/scientists/scholars are too entrenched in habits... they only see what they expect to see. The accident that led to my loss of vision was impossible to miss, but its seriousness was initially overlooked by at least two professionals.

Can you expand on the last sentence? Your comment was quite interesting. It’s pretty remarkable how long it took for the optician to get it.

Well... the accident that led to my eye being removed was in my workshop. Specifically, it was caused by my bench saw and its poor maintenance. The initial damage seemed slight but over time, my eye 'felt wrong'- tight and a bit achy, so I went to a local private hospital. There a young optician who did not seem bothered, prescribed eye drops. These had no impact at all, so I went to two other opticians, one of who said I had a detached retina. Finally I went to a state hospital and saw an ophthalmologist. She said the eye was infected and I needed to act fast if I wanted to save my sight. I tried to get it operated upon in that hospital, but they were keen to keep me 'under observation' far a few days. As I could still see out of that eye, they were reluctant to remove it. By this time, I was in quite a bit of pain and knew the only option was complete enucleation. So I discharged myself and went back to the private hospital. Even they were reluctant to operate until I had three second opinions, one of which I had to get from a specialist in Thailand. All of them seemed very worried that I had not yet had surgery to remove the dam thing.

My first mistake was in seeing a optometrists rather than ophthalmologists. However, all of them failed to recognize my case as one where I needed to be referred. To an optometrist, even a broken leg would be treated with eye drops.

The other thing that went wrong is that the surgeons I saw were nervous about proceeding with enucleation even when my condition became very advanced. I think that this nervousness came from the fact that I could still see out of that eye, and as a matter of insurance they wanted me to be blind before they would operate. But by then the infection might have spread to outside my eyeball.

Following surgery was a bit of a trip. For a few days I hallucinated in my missing eye... strange worm-like things, very Giger. Even now, in response to sudden movement or loud noises, I 'see' bright lights in that eye.

That's crazy. Is the eyeball a special place where antibiotics can't travel?

Maybe I'm missing part of the story, but going from infection to enucleation seems crazy. But I have no idea what's involved.

The infection was fungal, not bacterial or viral. Not uncommon in this part of the world S E Asia). Fungal infections spreading to the entire head are no joke.

The upside is that i get to choose the color of one of my eyes. Also I rock a cool eye patch.

I read a year or more ago that the art of making glass eyes is being lost to the world. I don't remember the reasons, except that it's a difficult task and not enough people are learning it and maybe that insurance companies aren't paying enough/as much (so there's not an incentive to do it anymore). I remember seeing pictures of the products of these artists. They were something to behold. So beautiful.

I can imagine a glass eye being very heavy. I have two fake eyes, both plastic. Neither was cheap, but both have been excellently made. A real craft. The thing that required most attention was fitting them… shaving them down to fit my interior prosthetic. That took the best part of two hours.

I used to do a bit of work at Madame Tussaud’s. There they preferred glass eyes to plastic ones for the quality of their shine. It was fun watching them being installed… they were pushed in from the back of the head.

Thanks for sharing!

Is the trained model available?

They posted the training/finetuning code here: https://github.com/eyefm/EyeFM

There’s a sample of the data here: https://zenodo.org/records/15546254

Looks like the weights are not available though. Several have asked in the GitHub issues it seems

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