Eye2Gene and Heidelberg Engineering Announce Partnership at ARVO 2024
Eye2Gene, an artificial intelligence research project based at University College London and Moorfields Eye Hospital, and Heidelberg Engineering have announced a partnership aimed at advancing ophthalmic diagnostics and personalized treatment approaches.
Eye2Gene, which is funded by the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), is working to engineer AI that can understand eye scans. By combining Eye2Gene's AI algorithm with Heidelberg Engineering image quality and workflow solutions, the companies say the partnership can improve the care pathway for patients with inherited retinal disease.
The partnership was announced at the ARVO 2024 Annual Meeting in Seattle, where the companies are demonstrating the integration of Eye2Gene's AI algorithm for the prediction of inherited retinal disease genes using Spectralis BluePeak Autofluorescence, cSLO Infrared, and OCT images, with HEYEX 2’s Heidelberg AppWay. Researchers can uncover how images acquired with the Spectralis can be interrogated by Eye2Gene to predict which gene is causing the inherited disease, offering a glimpse into the future of precision medicine in ophthalmology.
"Because inherited diseases are rare, they are challenging to diagnose for most non-specialists," Nikolas Pontikos, lead researcher for Eye2Gene, said in a company news release. “By training and validating a deep learning network with Spectralis data that has been de-identified and securely obtained from specialist hospitals such as Moorfields, Oxford, Liverpool, and Tokyo Medical Center, we can engineer an expert AI solution that may play an important role in democratizing expert knowledge for inherited retinal diseases. Partnering with Heidelberg Engineering to make our solution available within Heidelberg AppWay will foster collaboration with researchers to further validate the science and give us a platform to transition the technology into clinical practice in future.”
The Eye2Gene research project team will be presenting two posters at ARVO 2024 detailing the science behind the solution:
Tuesday 1:15 - 3:00pm PT William Woof B0397: Creating the World’s Largest Dataset of Segmented Inherited Retinal Disease Features by Bootstrapping Manual Annotations with AI
Wednesday 10:30 - 12:15pm PT Bernardo Souza Mendes B0111: Extending Eye2Gene to Quantify the Phenotypic Diversity and Similarity of 63 Inherited Retinal Diseases Using an Embedding Approach
ARVO attendees are also encouraged to visit Stand #1905 to learn more about the collaborative partnership between Eye2Gene and Heidelberg Engineering, experience a live demonstration of HEYEX 2 with Heidelberg Appway.