UCL and Moorfields researcher awarded UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to study eye scans as predictors of heart disease and dementia
Siegfried Wagner has been awarded a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship to expand his pioneering work in Oculomics, identifying biomarkers in the eye that indicate systemic health. Siegfried is a senior research fellow at University College London (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology, honorary consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, and research fellow at the INSIGHT Eye & Oculomics Health Data Research Hub at Moorfields.
The four-year fellowship will allow Siegfried to establish whether AI trained on routine eye scans can identify people at risk of cardiovascular disease and dementia, which together accounted for a quarter of all deaths in the UK last year.
Working across UCL and Moorfields, Siegfried will link routinely collected eye scans with local and national records of systemic disease, designed for use by regulators, technology developers and other researchers. Eye scan features linked to cardiovascular disease and dementia will then be checked against genetic and laboratory evidence to confirm that Oculomics algorithms are detecting genuine signs of disease and not false signals.
Prediction tools will be developed and tested for consistent performance across age groups and ethnic groups. With health economists, public health specialists and regulatory scientists, Siegfried and his team will model the clinical outcomes and cost-effectiveness of a UK-wide policy introducing oculomics in the community, while gathering views from patients, the public, professional bodies and regulators on the potential impact of early diagnosis and on the practical barriers to adoption.
Siegfried said: “More than 80% of adults attend an optician regularly, but we know that in 2023, only 9% of those eligible attended the NHS Health Check (the main cardiovascular screening programme in England), and people from socioeconomically disadvantaged groups were less likely to take part. Eye scans take little time to perform, and they are increasingly carried out in community settings rather than hospitals. These scans contain information about the heart and brain that the health service does not yet use. This fellowship gives us four years to find out whether that information can be turned into accurate and fair tools for identifying cardiovascular and dementia risk earlier, and what it would take to use them safely across the NHS.”
Project partners on the fellowship include the INSIGHT Eye & Oculomics Health Data Research Hub at Moorfields, the College of Optometrists, Harvard University, the Centre of Excellence for Regulatory Science and Innovation in AI & Digital Health, and Topcon Healthcare.
The Future Leaders Fellowships scheme was launched by UKRI in 2018 to develop, retain and attract research and innovation talent in the UK. It supports early-career researchers and innovators as they establish independent programmes of work, in universities and in business.
Acknowledgements
Siegfried Wagner acknowledges the kind support of Moorfields Eye Charity, Friends of Moorfields, and collaborators and mentors including: Danny Alexander, Arvind Chandratheva, Carol Cheung, Alastair Denniston, Tobias Elze, Marcus Fruttiger, Chris Hammond, Rod Jackson, Pearse Keane, Anthony Khawaja, Charlie Marshall, Stephen Morris, Krish Nirantharakumar, Axel Petzold, Jugnoo Rahi, Polly Rawlinson, Richard Riley, Cathie Sudlow, Yukun Zhou, Lisa Zhu.
