Screening 10X More Newborns for Preventable Vision Loss with AI

Pr3vent Medical AI is a Silicon Valley-based diagnostic company that builds AI-powered eye screening for infants. The company works to make newborn screening accessible and affordable enough to become standard care. Up to 97% of eye conditions in newborns can be treated in the first few months of life. The window is short. The stakes are permanent.

01 The Challenge

Four million newborns per year, and not enough ophthalmologists to screen them

More than four million babies are born in the United States every year. Most never receive a full eye screening. Retinopathy of prematurity alone affects roughly 15,000 premature infants annually. It remains a leading cause of preventable childhood blindness.

The bottleneck is specialists. The number of trained ophthalmologists who can diagnose eye disease from a newborn’s retina is small, and shrinking. Over 1,350 NICUs operate across the United States. The population of physicians qualified to perform neonatal eye exams is declining. The math does not work: too many infants, too few specialists.

Pr3vent’s leadership saw that the constraint was not knowledge but access. The clinical expertise exists. It is concentrated in a small number of physicians who cannot physically be in enough hospitals. Pr3vent set out to build an AI system that could extend that expertise to every newborn.

The company had a critical asset: exclusive access to over 350,000 retinal and fundus images of newborns. Top US ophthalmologists supported the labeling effort. Pr3vent needed a technology partner to turn that dataset into a production-grade, FDA-ready screening platform. Provectus, an AI-first systems integrator, joined the project.

02 The Approach

Build the labeling infrastructure first, then the AI platform, then the physician-facing application

The engagement had three distinct deliverables, each dependent on the one before it. First, a way to label 350,000+ retinal images at clinical quality and speed. Second, an FDA-compliant AI training and validation platform. Third, a screening application that ophthalmologists use in practice.

Standard labeling tools were too slow for clinical workflows. Ophthalmologists are expensive specialists. Every minute they spend labeling is a minute not spent diagnosing. The labeling system had to match their speed, not the other way around.

The FDA requirement shaped the entire architecture. Every component needed to be auditable, explainable, and monitored. Model training, dataset provenance, prediction confidence, and version history all had to be traceable. This was not a research prototype. It was a medical device.

03 The Build

Custom labeling system, FDA-ready AI platform, and physician screening application

Provectus built three components, bundled into a single application.

The labeling infrastructure lets ophthalmologists process up to 72 eye screens per minute. The system eliminates bias and ensures objectivity in the training data. Labeling quality directly determines model accuracy. Dozens of hours of specialist time were saved during the labeling phase alone.

The AI platform handles the full ML lifecycle. Dataset management, model training, evaluation, release management, and prediction explainability. It runs on AWS with Amazon SageMaker. Every model version is traceable. Every prediction is explainable. Every dataset change is logged. This audit trail makes the system FDA-ready.

The screening application is where physicians do their work. An ophthalmologist reviews the AI’s classification of each retinal image. They see the model’s confidence level and an explainability view highlighting where pathology was detected. Cases flagged as abnormal are sorted and prioritized automatically.

04 The Results

From screening limited by specialist availability to screening limited only by cameras in hospitals

The platform reduced the cost per screening by 10X. Manual ophthalmologist work dropped by 99%. The same number of specialists can now support screening for a population orders of magnitude larger. The AI handles the volume. The physician handles the diagnosis.

10X

Reduction in cost per screening

96% accuracy in detecting pathology

The 96% accuracy rate meets Pr3vent’s threshold for clinical-grade performance. Physicians see not just the prediction but the reasoning behind it. Which areas of the retinal image triggered the classification. At what confidence level. That transparency makes the system usable in clinical practice.

Broadly adopted, the platform could screen more than four million newborns per year in the US. Pr3vent estimates the societal savings at up to $3 billion annually in costs associated with preventable vision loss.

05 What’s Next

From a screening platform to a standard of newborn care

The AI platform is built and the clinical results support FDA submission. Provectus works with Pr3vent on extending diagnostic capabilities and preparing for broader deployment across the United States.