BALANCED Media|Technology, in partnership with the Retina Foundation of the Southwest and SMU, has announced a patent-pending medical imaging technology (U.S. Patent Application Serial No.16/538,662) that uses automated software and a video game to provide standardized, accurate and precise identification of ocular diseases including age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of visual impairment in the world.
BALANCED, the Retina Foundation of the Southwest and SMU also signed a 10-year exclusive license, development and commercialization agreement for BALANCED to bring the medical imaging technology to the $35 billion artificial intelligence (AI) health care market.
BALANCED created and crowdsourced an original video game, Eye in the Sky: Defender. The game uses optical coherence tomography (OCT) retinal images embedded in the game’s environment to create human-computational image segmentation. As players predict the path of the alien force in the game, they unknowingly learn to trace lines used to perform diagnostic measurements of OCT retinal scans and create new datasets.
When integrated with BALANCED’s HEWMEN AI platform, these new datasets were used by experts at the Retina Foundation and SMU researchers to provide the information needed to train a machine learning (ML) algorithm to analyze OCT images more accurately and precisely.
“Human and machine collaboration is the next step in machine learning and AI,” says Corey Clark, deputy director of research and assistant professor of computer science and engineering for SMU Guildhall, an assistant professor of Computer Science at SMU Lyle School of Engineering and CTO at BALANCED. “This application is a great example showing how injecting human knowledge and intuition into the machine learning process is able to create something that neither were capable of doing on their own. This is just the first step. I believe we will see many more exciting things come from these collaborations in the future.”
Read more at SMU Research.