theceomagazine.com | 109based care. This is a major project for the
centre, he explains, and one that will require
quite a shift in mindset and significant
partnership-building.
SNEC is aiming to provide a more
holistic experience for patients who continue
to be treated at its main site. “Patient
experience is a very important part of the
care process,” he notes. “These days, people
don’t just want their eye problem solved.
Instead, they want a pleasant visit and a full
experience – they have to feel that their eye
care is not onerous.”
As the centre meets these challenges, Tien
Yin says innovation and entrepreneurship will
be its watchwords. And that there may be
further opportunities to expand the centre’s
services or to look at more effective
financing models. The sector is also advancing
quickly in South East Asia, which will
provide interesting competition in terms
of the centre achieving true international
recognition a s the leading eye care facility
in the region.
One example of SNEC’s commitment
to innovation is its cutting-edge artificial
intelligence (AI) project, a world first.
“We are now able to use very advanced techniques to help
us in the way we screen, diagnose and detect diseases using
computer systems. It’s truly a very exciting area.”
Developing this technology involved collecting more
than half a million retinal images from people of different
ethnicities to build a comprehensive dataset. The AI system
was then trained to recognise diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma,
and age-related macular degeneration. Tien Yin believes the
technology could eventually reduce the workload of graders
and optometrists who do this testing by up to 80 per cent,
freeing them to spend more time treating patients.
The project was also highly collaborative in nature,
involving not just SNEC and SERI, but the NUS School
of Computing, and eye centres in China, Hong Kong,
Mexico, Australia and the US. Preliminary results from
the project have been hugely promising and have already
been published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, (JAMA), a highly reputable medical journal.
These projects show an evolving institution that is
moving towards Tien Yin’s vision of international leadership.
However, he is adamant that there is no place for
complacency in an institution with such ambition. This also
applies to himself, despite his lengthy list of honours and
years of high-level experience as a physician, researcher and
manager, Tien Yin insists there is always new knowledge to
be gleaned. “Even now, all this time later, I’m learning every
day. And whenever I see a patient, I’m still learning.”