BALANCED Media|Technology’s groundbreaking work on Optical Coherence Tomography was featured in this month’s issue of D Magazine. BALANCED’s game Eye in the Sky: Defender, created in partnership with Southern Methodist University (SMU) in partnership with Johns Hopkins University and the Retina Foundation of the Southwest (Retina), revolutionizes the evaluation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans of the human retina.

“This technology could be a game-changer for researchers and drug manufacturers in the data analyzation of disease progression…”

-Dr. Karl Csaky, Retina Foundation

Eye in the Sky: Defender is powered by BALANCED’s HEWMEN technology, which inserts human problem solving into the machine learning (ML) loop. Eye in the Sky: Defender embeds retinal OCT images into the game environment with players learning to recognize certain visual markers that are used to diagnose and track progression of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). The game successfully created new datasets that were then used by researchers SMU to train a machine learning algorithm to analyze OCT images (and other image types) more accurately and precisely.

D Magazine article excerpt

Macular degeneration can now be detected by playing video games. With the aid of human-guided artificial intelligence, patent-pending medical imaging technology from SMU can diagnose and track treatment effectiveness of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD).

Dr. Corey Clark, the deputy director and research and assistant professor of computer science and engineering at SMU, worked with Johns Hopkins University, The Retina Foundation Southwest, and BALANCED Media to build an online video game centered around OCT retinal scans.

The original video game is titled Eye in the Sky: Defender, where players immerse themselves in a world of aliens invading the players’ base. Players trace the paths alien invaders take, and clinicians use the OCT images produced by these actions to detect macular degeneration in the player. The game is being used to provide standardized, accurate, and precise identification of ocular diseases.

BALANCED, Retina, and SMU signed a 10-year exclusive license to develop and commercialize the medical imaging technology to the $35 billion AI healthcare market.

“It’s now possible to use AI to quickly analyze millions of individual datasets (retinal images) to detect patterns and pathologies that would have been impossible or impractical given the scope.”

-Corey Clark, PhD, BALANCED

Read the entire article at D Magazine:

SMU Is Gamifying the Detection of Macular Degeneration