Daniel S.W. Ting

Associate, Professor, Duke-NUS Medical School; Chief Data and Digital Officer, Singapore National Eye Center; Head, AI and Digital Innovation, Singapore Eye Research Institute; Innovation Mentor, Byers Eye Institute, Stanford University, Singapore

What is an interesting or little-known fact about you?

I need to sleep five hours a day.

Why did you decide to pursue ophthalmology/your subspecialty?

Great mix of both medical and surgical cases, beautiful imaging, inspiring role models, odourless, surgeries are high paced, minimally invasive with great finesse.

Who is someone in ophthalmology/your subspecialty that you feel has been particularly influential over the past 10 years?

Jean Bennett.

What’s been the biggest breakthrough in ophthalmology/your specific field over the last 10 years?

The advent of deep learning has revolutionized the medical imaging analysis and natural language processing. Over the past 10 years, many AI and deep learning systems were developed for image segmentation, classification and prediction across different ophthalmology subspecialties including retina. With the recent excitement about chatGPT/GPT 4.0, alphafold and quantum computing, these technology discoveries would open up many exciting opportunities in medicine for the next 10 years.

What would you like to see change in ophthalmology/your subspecialty over the next 10 years – and why?

More AI and a more digitally literate next generation – this could unlock a lot more opportunities to build more state-of-art technologies to help improve eye care access worldwide to prevent blindness.

Where do you predict ophthalmology/your subspecialty will be 10 years from now?

More data and digital driven.

Do you have any personal missions for the next 10 years?

Bring more AI-enabled smart digital and wearable technologies from bench to bedside.

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

Elon Musk.