Decision Support Systems and Applications in Ophthalmology: Literature and Commercial Review Focused on Mobile Apps

Abstract

The growing importance that mobile devices have in daily life has also reached health care and medicine. This is making the paradigm of health care change and the concept of mHealth or mobile health more relevant, whose main essence is the apps. This new reality makes it possible for doctors who are not specialist to have easy access to all the information generated in different corners of the world, making them potential keepers of that knowledge. However, the new daily information exceeds the limits of the human intellect, making Decision Support Systems (DSS) necessary for helping doctors to diagnose diseases and also help them to decide the attitude that has to be taken towards these diagnoses. These could improve the health care in remote areas and developing countries. All of this is even more important in diseases that are more prevalent in primary care and that directly affect the people's quality of life, this is the case in ophthalmological problems where in first patient care a specialist in ophthalmology is not involved. The goal of this paper is to analyse the state of the art of DSS in Ophthalmology. Many of them focused on diseases affecting the eye's posterior pole. For achieving the main purpose of this research work, a literature review and commercial apps analysis will be done. The used databases and systems will be IEEE Xplore, Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and PubMed. The search is limited to articles published from 2000 until now. Later, different Mobile Decision Support System (MDSS) in Ophthalmology will be analyzed in the virtual stores for Android and iOS. 37 articles were selected according their thematic (posterior pole, anterior pole, Electronic Health Records (EHRs), cloud, data mining, algorithms and structures for DSS, and other) from a total of 600 found in the above cited databases. Very few mobile apps were found in the different stores. It can be concluded that almost all existing mobile apps are focused on the eye's posterior pole. Among them, the most intended are for diagnostic of diabetic retinopathy. The primary market niche of the commercial apps is the general physicians.

A Proposed Solution and Future Direction for Blockchain-Based Heterogeneous Medicare Data in Cloud Environment

“…Security features are modified in the model due to restricted counterfeit. Ophthalmology based apps for decision support system has been proposed recently by [11]. This mobile system based apps has played a vital role in mining different specialist's decision on a particular issues rose by someone, who hasn't enough knowledge in the field of ophthalmology for diagnose the disease.…”

Aplicaciones móviles de salud con respaldo en publicaciones científicas, para la mejora en el ejercicio de la optometría y la oftalmología

“…Un hallazgo que vale la pena resaltar es la consecución de artículos de revisión con temática y metodología similares a las planteadas en esta revisión. Sin embargo, difieren en aspectos como la intención de cuantificar las aplicaciones existentes; evaluar la participación profesional en el desarrollo de estas; analizar solo sobre el desarrollo de aplicaciones comerciales, con características específicas, en un caso, solo juegos y, en el otro, desarrollo de los sistemas de soporte a la decisión (DSS) (3,8,20). En sentido opuesto, esta investigación tiene un fin más cualitativo.…”

“…El uso de aplicaciones móviles no solamente se realiza en el ámbito personal, sino que los usuarios también emplean aplicaciones específicas que les ayudan día a día en el trabajo. Según la consultora Gartner, en 2018 el 70 % de los profesionales emplearía sus dispositivos móviles para llevar a cabo su tarea profesional, puesto que la tendencia de diseño de aplicaciones móviles derivará hacia aquellas que sean útiles, sencillas de manejar y que cumplan las necesidades profesionales (2,3).…”

“…La llamada mHealth es una realidad para usuarios y médicos, de acuerdo con un estudio del Institute for Health Care Informatics. En la actualidad hay más de 97.000 aplicaciones de salud y medicina disponibles en todas las tiendas de aplicaciones móviles; además, la consultora Juniper Research afirmó que en 2018 había alrededor de 96 millones de personas que usaban estas aplicaciones (3,9).…”

Priority medical image delivery using DTN for healthcare workers in volcanic emergency

“…The remaining 60 are of low priority. In a disaster zone without an ophthalmologist, this application can support healthcare workers by providing a way to transmit information about the symptoms of common eye diseases (De La Torre-Diez et al 2015).…”