AI-powered Retinal Abnormality Screening Tool

Despite significant advances in retinal imaging and treatment, avoidable blindness remains a growing public health challenge in India and other low- and middle-income regions. Conditions such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration often progress silently and are detected late, when vision loss is irreversible. The core problem is not the lack of treatment, but the absence of timely, scalable, and high-quality detection and referral at the community and primary-care level. Retinal screening today is constrained by the dependence on scarce specialists, bulky and expensive equipment, subjective interpretation of images, and weak referral linkages between screening sites and retina specialists. As a result, millions of at-risk individuals - especially the elderly, diabetics, and underserved populations - remain unscreened. Manual screening and interpretation also introduce variability, limiting consistency and confidence in referral decisions. Artelus addresses this by rethinking retinal care as an end-to-end, technology-enabled pathway. Enabling early, accurate, and autonomous detection of retinal pathologies at scale, using portable robotic imaging systems combined with deep learning, while ensuring that identified patients are seamlessly triaged and referred into appropriate care pathways. Without such an integrated, AI-driven approach, preventable blindness will continue to rise despite the availability of effective therapies.

Artelus is an Indian deeptech healthcare company focused on preventing avoidable blindness (which accounts for 90% of all blindness) by making retinal screening and diagnosis accurate, affordable, accessible, and available. The organization designs and manufactures portable, electricity-independent ophthalmic imaging devices and pairs them with AI-based retinal analytics to detect abnormalities early - especially in largescale screening settings where specialist availability is limited. Artelus operates at the intersection of medical devices and applied AI. Its flagship offerings include a portable operator-independent fundus camera and a portable OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) system, along with AI models for multi-pathology retinal abnormality detection. The company emphasizes field-ready deployment: easy-to-use devices, rapid image capture, and decision-support reports that can improve productivity for clinicians and screening programs. The company holds ISO 13485:2016 certification and has built a strong intellectual property base, with 18 patents. Artelus has enabled large-scale impact through screening initiatives—having screened over 180,000 people and identified more than 40,000 individuals with retinal abnormalities—supporting early referral and treatment pathways. It has also been recognized among leading patent filers in the Indian deeptech startup ecosystem and has received multiple awards and recognitions. Artelus’ mission is to reduce the burden of blindness through scalable AI-enabled retinal screening, with long-term aspirations to support doctors globally and expand deployments beyond India, including emerging markets and regulated geographies through regulatory approvals and clinical evaluations.