What is childhood uveitis?

Childhood uveitis is a blinding inflammatory eye disease, and we need to get better at detecting and monitoring it.

The key uveitis assessment is a specialist looking inside an eye using a microscope to judge how many inflammatory cells they can see.

Here's a specialist looking inside a child's eye using a microscope:

And here's the view through the microscope of inflammatory cells inside the eye (we've chosen an image of an eye with a really high level of inflammation so that there are lots of cells to see)

Optical coherence tomography images - what are we trying to learn?

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) cameras are modern imaging machines which can take highly detailed pictures of the inside structures of the eye. You may have been offered an OCT scan of the back of the eye when you go to the opticians. Newer models of OCT machines can also take images of the front of the eye - and these images are detailed enough to allow us to see the cells inside the eye. We've been using these cameras in a research study involving children with uveitis, to see if we can improve how we manage these children. Here's a picture of a 4 year old about to have their 'photo' taken with an OCT:

Our early studies suggest that we can use OCT images to detect uveitis, but we still need to decide which images tell us most about the eye, how many scans we actually need from each child to get a useful measure of disease, and what different machines tell us about the eye disease. This means analysing how the images taken from an eye relate to what a clinician sees through a microscope.

Are the images good enough to allow us to let children be monitored at a health centre near them rather than traveling across the country to be seen at one of the few specialists centres in the UK?

If the images pick up cells, but the specialist hasn't seen anything, what does that tell us about how to treat the uveitis?

Right now we use a trial and error approach to choosing which treatment to use for childhood uveitis - and researchers are looking for signals which tell us which treatment to choose for individual children so we can get the disease under control faster. Can the distribution, size or shape of the bloods cells we can see on imaging help us predict which treatment the child will respond to?

We need your help!

The more images we capture from each eye, the more information we have for the analyses - but that means more images to analyse!

Eventually, we will need to automate analysis using artificial intelligence, but first we need to build up a bank of images that have been analysed and labelled by humans- like you! These images are taken from children and young people - they have given permission for their images to be used in this project, and are all really excited that this study is underway. We are a small team, but with your help, we can start to develop the information we need to apply this exciting new technology to children in need.

Image Credit: Academy of Medical Sciences, AL Solebo, AL Solebo