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Oculomics & the NHS: translating eye-derived biomarkers into population health

  • INSIGHT communications team
  • 7 hours ago
  • 1 min read

The UK is uniquely placed to realise the potential of oculomics and translate eye biomarkers into population health, argues a new commentary in the journal Eye by INSIGHT Director Professor Pearse Keane and our colleagues Siegfried Wagner and Alexander Heatley of UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.


Illustration of an eye cross-section with blood vessels, next to the outline of a human body with vascular system
Because the tiny blood vessels at the back of the eye share characteristics with the body's broader vascular system, routine retinal scans act as a non-invasive window into cardiovascular and neurological health.

The authors maintain the UK has a distinctive set of assets that can move oculomics from the lab to the real world:

  • National health service with linked longitudinal records

  • Population-scale diabetic eye screening

  • Large community optometry network

  • Datasets linking ocular imaging with health phenotypes, such as through UK Biobank, AlzEye, and the Scottish Collaborative Optometry-Ophthalmology Network e-research (SCONe).

  • Governance structures designed to make ophthalmic data usable for research while maintaining public trust, as evident at INSIGHT, which now links more than 30 million retinal images to clinical records, anonymised, curated and made accessible to researchers for patient benefit.


This combination of factors makes the UK one of the few places positioned to test whether predictive oculomics AI holds up in clinical practice and improves outcomes for patients.


Ophthalmologists and optometrists should shape this field, say the authors, not wait to evaluate tools built elsewhere on datasets that may not reflect NHS populations or pathways.


 
 
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