BALANCED Media|Technology’s revolutionary work on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) was featured in this month’s issue of Dallas Innovates. BALANCED’s Eye in the Sky: Defender, created in partnership with Southern Methodist University (SMU), Johns Hopkins University, and the Retina Foundation of the Southwest, is a game powered by BALANCED’s HEWMEN technology. The game inserts human problem solving into the machine learning (ML) loop by embedding retinal OCT images into the game environment so that players learn to recognize certain visual markers that are used to diagnose and track the progression of Age-related Macular Degeneration. By crowdsourcing gamers’ intelligence and unstructured problem-solving skills and combining them with raw computational power, the game successfully created new datasets that were then used by researchers at SMU to train an ML algorithm to analyze OCT images more accurately and precisely.

“If you have to use machine learning alone, you need hundreds of thousands of images for the machine to keep iterating and iterating by force of logic. By doing this gaming, we can short circuit that process.”

-Dr. Karl Csaky, Retina Foundation

Read the entire article at Dallas Innovates:

Local Startup Aims to Save Peoples’ Sight with Video Games