Dr Ramasamy Kim, head of retina services at an eye hospital in southern India, and his team at the Aravind eye hospital in Madurai have examined about 15,000 images from across the country showing the interior surface of the eyeball, known as the fundus.
By grading each image, marking abnormal spots, lesions and indications of bleeding, they have contributed to a database of retinal images from all over the world, compiled by Google and its health tech subsidiary, Verily.
The data has been assembled into an algorithm, a set of instructions built into a computer program to identify eye complications arising from diabetes.