An eyecare foundation model for clinical assistance
11 comments
·August 28, 2025Daub
e40
Can you expand on the last sentence? Your comment was quite interesting. It’s pretty remarkable how long it took for the optician to get it.
Daub
Well... the accident that led to my eye being removed was in my workshop. Specifically, it was caused by my bench saw and its poor maintenance. The initial damage seemed slight but over time, my eye 'felt wrong'- tight and a bit achy, so I went to a local private hospital. There a young optician who did not seem bothered, prescribed eye drops. These had no impact at all, so I went to two other opticians, one of who said I had a detached retina. Finally I went to a state hospital and saw an ophthalmologist. She said the eye was infected and I needed to act fast if I wanted to save my sight. I tried to get it operated upon in that hospital, but they were keen to keep me 'under observation' far a few days. As I could still see out of that eye, they were reluctant to remove it. By this time, I was in quite a bit of pain and knew the only option was complete enucleation. So I discharged myself and went back to the private hospital. Even they were reluctant to operate until I had three second opinions, one of which I had to get from a specialist in Thailand. All of them seemed very worried that I had not yet had surgery to remove the dam thing.
My first mistake was in seeing a optometrists rather than ophthalmologists. However, all of them failed to recognize my case as one where I needed to be referred. To an optometrist, even a broken leg would be treated with eye drops.
The other thing that went wrong is that the surgeons I saw were nervous about proceeding with enucleation even when my condition became very advanced. I think that this nervousness came from the fact that I could still see out of that eye, and as a matter of insurance they wanted me to be blind before they would operate. But by then the infection might have spread to outside my eyeball.
Following surgery was a bit of a trip. For a few days I hallucinated in my missing eye... strange worm-like things, very Giger. Even now, in response to sudden movement or loud noises, I 'see' bright lights in that eye.
copperx
That's crazy. Is the eyeball a special place where antibiotics can't travel?
Maybe I'm missing part of the story, but going from infection to enucleation seems crazy. But I have no idea what's involved.
e40
Thanks for sharing!
dust42
Is the trained model available?
jameslk
They posted the training/finetuning code here: https://github.com/eyefm/EyeFM
There’s a sample of the data here: https://zenodo.org/records/15546254
Looks like the weights are not available though. Several have asked in the GitHub issues it seems
Funny story. I have only one eye, and when in public I signify this by wearing a very obvious eye path. Even without the eye patch, my prosthetic eye looks nothing like my functioning eye (by choice).
I went to the optician a few weeks ago in order to get a new pair of glasses who performed the usual tests. She knew full well that I have only one eye, but when testing my functioning eye she handed me the eye occluder to place over my non-functioning eye. I asked her why she was doing this as it served no function but she clearly did not understand the question. It took nearly a full minute for me to explain to her how pointless using this occluder was. It was rewarding to see the veils of habit lift when she finally grokked my point.
As for the article... it seems like a valid application of technology. Relevant to my anecdote, some doctors/diagnosticians/scientists/scholars are too entrenched in habits... they only see what they expect to see. The accident that led to my loss of vision was impossible to miss, but its seriousness was initially overlooked by at least two professionals.