The device has up to to 87 percent sensitivity – patients who did have the mild diabetic retinopathy were correctly identified; 90 per cent specificity – patients who did not have the disease and were correctly identified as having no eye damage
Meaning that 13% of patients with the disease are not detected. That's not great, and I'm surprised they are proposing to remove the doctors entirely. Could it be that the doctors are even worse?
I think that typically, these detection systems err on the safe side – reduce false negatives as much as possible, even if that raises the false positives – and then all those detected as positive go through a more precise and more expensive screening with a human doctor. Maybe here the 10% false positives are already so numerous that they don't want to be more aggressive.