It gives me a great pleasure to be on board the journey into the era of technology driven healthcare. After practicing Ophthalmology for over 35 years, training artificial intelligence (AI) models and making them work like me, is very exciting. Though, at present, many of these are in silos, I look forward to integrating them into a streamlined workflow for helping the clinicians. I am sure, as time goes by, intelligent machines would become the best buddies for doctors to work with.

In the first innings of my career, I was fortunate to be amongst the pioneers of Intraocular Lens implantation and phacoemulsification for cataract surgery, way back in late 80's and early 90's, and Lasek for refractive surgery in 2001. Then came a paradigm shift of skills being transferred from doctors to machines. The surgeons of course, had to learn how to operate such machines. The result was good for the patients because surgeries became safer, and more and more doctors could give very good results. Now is the time when machines are beginning to think and act like doctors themselves.

I have always loved to do challenging and innovative things in medicine. So, in my second innings, instead of continuing to adopt new technologies, I transformed myself to work in technology itself. I learnt programming in Python, revised my mathematics, did a formal course on AI in Digital Health and Imaging from IISc, Bengaluru, got well versed with pytorch framework and started building machine learning and deep learning models. The most exciting part for me was explaining the reason, or the 'why', of the model’s decision using class activation maps. The scope of applications of AI in healthcare is in every stage of management of an individual’s health, from good health to sickness. My journey seems to be never ending. I have already begun working with transformers, NLP, and Graph Neural Networks. AI has become a passion for me.