The American Academy of Ophthalmology IRIS Registry (Intelligent Research In Sight): current and future state of big data analytics

Purpose of review To describe the drivers, development, and current state of the American Academy of Ophthalmology IRIS Registry (Intelligent Research In Sight), and analytics involving deidentified aggregate IRIS Registry data. Recent findings The IRIS Registry has a core mission of quality improvement and reporting. In addition, analytic projects performed to date have included characterizing patient populations and diseases, incidence, and prevalence; clinical outcomes and complications; risk factors and effect modifiers; practice patterns; and trends over time. Pipeline projects include application of artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches for predictive modeling and analytics, disease mapping, detecting patterns and identifying cohorts, and optimizing treatment based on patient-specific characteristics. Summary The IRIS Registry is the nation's largest single specialty clinical registry, with unique data elements specific to ophthalmology. It offers a wealth of opportunities involving big data analytics, including traditional inferential statistics as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches scalable on massive amounts of data.