A non-invasive diabetes diagnosis method based on novel scleral imaging instrument and AI

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is one of the most common metabolic diseases in the world. However, frequent blood glucose testing causes continual harm to diabetics, which cannot meet the needs of early diagnosis and long-term tracking of diabetes. Thus non-invasive adjuvant diagnosis methods are urgently needed, enabling early screening of the population for diabetes, the evaluation of diabetes risk, and assessment of therapeutic effects. The human eye plays an important role in painless and non-invasive approaches, because it is considered an internal organ but can be easily be externally observed. We developed an AI model to predict the probability of diabetes from scleral images taken by a specially developed instrument, which could conveniently and quickly collect complete scleral images in four directions and perform artificial intelligence (AI) analysis in 3 min without any reagent consumption or the need for a laboratory. The novel optical instrument could adaptively eliminate reflections and collected shadow-free scleral images. 177 subjects were recruited to participate in this experiment, including 127 benign subjects and 50 malignant subjects. The blood sample and sclera images from each subject was obtained. The scleral image classification model achieved a mean AUC over 0.85, which indicates great potential for early screening of practical diabetes during periodic physical checkups or daily family health monitoring. With this AI scleral features imaging and analysis method, diabetic patients’ health conditions can be rapidly, noninvasively, and accurately analyzed, which offers a platform for noninvasive forecasting, early diagnosis, and long-term monitoring for diabetes and its complications.