Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center and Meinian Dajiankang Launch Ophthalmic Screening Alliance to Advance AI-Powered Eye Disease Prevention

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that on June 11, the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center of Sun Yat-sen University partnered with Meinian Onehealth, China’s largest health management platform, to announce the establishment of an “Ophthalmology Specialty Medical Consortium for Physical Examinations.” Targeting primary healthcare settings such as physical examination centers and community health service centers, the consortium aims to explore high-efficiency, low-cost models for the prevention, control, screening, diagnosis, and treatment of eye diseases. Its services will cover more than ten provinces, including Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, and Hainan. The two parties will also jointly launch a three-year, AI-assisted diagnostic screening project targeting major eye diseases, with a coverage scale of tens of millions of individuals.

On that day, the signing ceremony for the establishment of the medical consortium was held at the Academic Lecture Hall of Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center. Feng Huiqiang, Director of the Disease Control and Prevention Division of the Guangdong Provincial Health Commission; Liu Yizhi, President of Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center; Xu Ke, President of Meinian Onehealth (Health 100); and Ning Yi, Executive Dean of Meinian Research Institute, delivered remarks and keynote speeches at the event. Xia Dan, Secretary of the Party Leadership Group of Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, and Zhao Yu, Founder of Silicon Intelligence, a company within the Meinian Ecosystem, attended the signing ceremony.

Reporters learned from the signing ceremony that the medical consortium will leverage a telemedicine imaging technology platform to explore a service model of “distributed image acquisition + centralized image analysis,” thereby extending the reach of high-quality medical resources and enhancing the efficiency of image interpretation and diagnosis through innovative technologies.

After ophthalmic images are collected at Health 100 check-up centers and primary community health service centers nationwide, they are uploaded via the PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) to a reading center. There, artificial intelligence-assisted diagnostic technology is employed to intelligently analyze the ophthalmic imaging data, and the final examination reports are reviewed and issued by ophthalmologists at the reading center.

Feng Huiqiang, Director of the Disease Control and Prevention Division of the Guangdong Provincial Health Commission, stated that the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center is China’s largest public tertiary A-grade ophthalmic hospital and a domestic leader in the field of ophthalmology, while Meinian Onehealth’s health examination services are at the forefront of the industry. Therefore, this collaboration between the two parties is timely. The innovative establishment of this model will help shift the focus of high-quality eye healthcare resources to the grassroots level, enhance the overall efficiency of the eye healthcare service system, and facilitate the transition of the medical model from a disease-treatment-centered approach to a prevention-centered one.

Xu Ke, President of Meinian Onehealth Group, stated that the group’s business has expanded to 301 cities, with over 600 specialized medical examination centers. In 2018, it provided professional health check-up services to 30 million people, and this figure is projected to exceed 100 million by 2021.

Xu Ke believes that the partnership between Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center and Meinian Onehealth represents a strong alliance between preventive care and clinical diagnostic resources. By targeting primary healthcare settings such as physical examination centers, this collaboration explores high-efficiency, low-cost models for the prevention and control of eye diseases, thereby playing a positive role in advancing national eye health management.

It is reported that a three-tier prevention and control system for eye diseases will be established within the ophthalmology specialist medical consortium, with green referral channels opened. This will facilitate timely referral and treatment for patients with positive findings identified by Health 100 and community health service centers, enabling early screening, prevention, and treatment of major eye diseases. These efforts will support the initiative of “primary-level examination and superior-level diagnosis” and help build an orderly tiered diagnosis and treatment framework.

Liu Yizhi, Dean of the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, stated that Meinian Onehealth is a leading enterprise in China’s health checkup industry. The Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center and Meinian Onehealth can achieve differentiated development and complementary advantages by creating an innovative collaborative model for a medical consortium focused on health examinations. This initiative serves as a pilot and demonstration aimed at enhancing the level of eye health protection for the general public.

Currently, the situation regarding eye disease prevention and control and national eye health management in China is severe. The prevalence and blindness rates of major eye diseases—including diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), hypertensive retinopathy, cataracts, refractive errors, and myopia—are rising year by year.

At the signing ceremony, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center and Meinian Onehealth jointly announced a three-year, AI-assisted diagnostic screening initiative targeting major eye diseases, with a coverage scale of tens of millions of screenings.

Health 100 and the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center will also jointly establish a specialized database for fundus diseases within the medical consortium, conduct in-depth scientific research based on large-scale fundus images and associated data, and actively promote regulatory standards and guidelines for the application of AI-assisted diagnostic technologies in the field of remote medical imaging.

According to VCBeat, Silicon Intelligence, a company within the Meinian Onehealth Group ecosystem, has obtained China’s first registration testing report for an AI-assisted diagnostic product issued by the National Institutes for Food and Drug Control (NIFDC). Previously, Silicon Intelligence was deeply involved in the development of China’s first AI standard test dataset (fundus portion), which was led by the NIFDC with the joint participation of nine enterprises. Additionally, it completed a multi-center prospective clinical trial involving 1,000 samples, led by the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center and participated in by Peking University People’s Hospital and Wenzhou Medical University Eye Hospital. Recently, Silicon Intelligence’s “Diabetic Retinopathy Analysis Software” has entered the approval and review process for innovative medical devices.