A digital online platform for education and certification of diabetic retinopathy health care professionals in the Region of Southern Denmark

Abstract

Purpose: The incidence of diabetes continues to increase across the world. As the number of patients rises, so does the need for educated health care professionals. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) remains one of the primary complications in diabetes, and screening has proved to be a cost-effective measure to avoid DR-related blindness. Denmark has an established screening programme, but no formal training of the people responsible for analysing retinal images. Methods: We here present an online learning platform that offers a diabetic eye screening course for health care professionals undertaking screening responsibility in the Region of Southern Denmark. The course is divided into lectures, each focussed on identifying different levels of DR or detecting related lesions. The course is free to use on-demand, contains instructional videos, interactive tests and exercises, and it is concluded with a certification test. The tools on the platform can in addition be used to generate data for research purposes, such as comparing users or experts in detection of lesions or annotating data for the development of machine learning models. Results: More than 150 participants have so far completed the course, and the platform is being adopted for education in other regions of Denmark.

Five-Year Incidence of Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy and Associated Risk Factors in a Nationwide Cohort of 201 945 Danish Patients with Diabetes

“…Likewise, a virtual ocular learning platform has been nationally launched to support training in DR grading of Danish ophthalmologists. 31 Second, data on glycaemic control, hypertension, body mass index, smoking, and physical activity were not included because of unavailability. Third, it was not possible to include data on diabetic macular edema because of inconsistent reporting in DiaBase.…”

Inter‐grader reliability in the Danish screening programme for diabetic retinopathy

“…Further initiatives to strengthen DR gradings, by educational resources such as VIOLA (Andersen et al, 2022), is available to all Danish ophthalmologists screening for DR, and ensures continued skill development, maintenance of high grading quality following up‐to‐date guidelines. More than 150 ophthalmologists and ophthalmologists in training have completed the programme so far, and even more are utilizing it as a training resource.…”

“…All graders are familiar with the Danish National Guidelines provided by the Danish Ophthalmological Society, and additional free virtual training resources are available to all graders in Denmark. The secondary grader was also a medical doctor in the field of ophthalmology, certified in DR grading of retinal images at the Ophthalmic Reading Centre, Centre for Public Health, Royal Victoria Hospital Site, Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland and had also completed a virtual training platform for education and certification of DR; Virtual ocular learning platform (VIOLA; Andersen et al, 2022) at Odense University Hospital, Denmark.…”

Automatic Detection of Abnormalities and Grading of Diabetic Retinopathy in 6-Field Retinal Images: Integration of Segmentation Into Classification

“…Images had been annotated by two retinal experts independent from each other using a proprietary data annotation tool. 28 The quality of the data set was validated using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) as a measure of agreement between experts for each abnormality type. Good to excellent agreement was found for MA (0.81), HEM (0.83), HE (0.91), CWS (0.91), IRMA (0.77), and PC (0.99).…”