In Germany there are around 10,000 new cases of blindness every year, with 50% being caused by so-called age-related macular degeneration and 17% by diabetic retinopathy. Intravitreal surgical drug administration (IVOM) is a common therapy to maintain or improve vision in these diseases.

EyeMatics is a project that collects and analyzes clinical data from IVOM patients from various clinical information systems. Using a harmonized core data set, it combines information sources from four university hospitals (Aachen, Greifswald, Münster and Tübingen) and two rollout partners (Chemnitz Hospital and Leipzig University Hospital) and uses established statistical methods as well as the most modern pattern recognition processes in artificial intelligence to identify new characteristic features of the above-mentioned eye diseases to identify and examine their progression during IVOM therapy.

The project is an extension of the existing work of the Medical Informatics Initiative, which aims to make data from health care and research more usable in order to strengthen research and improve care. The added value of this project is that it enables analysis of “real world” clinical data generated at various locations in the context of ophthalmology for the first time. In addition, patients are actively involved with the help of the patient association PRO RETINA Deutschland e.V. and through the collection of patient reported outcomes. The combined data is evaluated for various demographic and clinical parameters, treatment data as well as state-of-the-art imaging and treatment patterns.