11-year-old Malayali girl develops an AI-based app to detect eye diseases and conditions

An 11-year-old Malayali girl living in Dubai has created an artificial intelligence-based application that she says can identify different eye ailments and illnesses. Leena Rafeeq announced her innovative product, which makes use of an iPhone scanning technique, on LinkedIn. The software, called "Ogler EyeScan," was created when Leena was ten years old.

She said that the app is presently being reviewed by Apple and expressed her optimism that it will be accepted shortly.

She posted a video showcasing the Ogler EyeScan's functionality, in which trained models were used to diagnose illnesses including Arcus, Melanoma, Pterygium, and Cataracts. Leena asserted that the software uses sophisticated computer vision and machine learning algorithms to "analyze characteristics like light and color intensity, distance, and look-up locations to find the eyeballs within the frame range." She noted that it shows whether there are any light burst problems and whether the eyes are perfectly positioned inside the scanner frame.

Leena provided further information on her invention, revealing that it was developed over six months using just SwiftUI natively, without the use of any third-party libraries or packages.

The self-taught programmer said that she learned more about "eye conditions, computer vision, algorithms, machine learning models, and advanced levels of Apple iOS programming, including sensors data, AR, CreateML, and CoreML" throughout the development process. Only iPhones running iOS 16 or later and version 10 of the app are presently supported.

Many users praised Leena for her accomplishment at such a young age in the comment area. That is an excellent example of employing artificial intelligence to improve equitable health, according to one user. Leena responded to users who asked about the app's accuracy by stating that it is now close to 70%. She did, however, mention the challenges posed by glare and light bursts brought on by the distance needed to take scans. Metrics and detection for light-related issues are being introduced to address this issue and allow consumers to retake the scan. She said that an update will be issued when the Ogler EyeScan was approved by the app store.

Hana, Leena's younger sister, previously gained notoriety for breaking the record for the youngest iOS app developer by creating a storytelling app at the age of 9. The achievement even attracted Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.