Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth receives award from the American Academy of Ophthalmology

Bild: MedUni Wien/feelimage - Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth, Head of MedUni Vienna's Department of Ophthalmology and Optometry, has been awarded the prestigious Arnall Platz Medal by the American Academy of Ophthalmology for her pioneering achievements in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare via the analysis of retinal images and delivered this year's Arnall Platz Lecture at the society's Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Since 2013, Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth and the research group for ophthalmological image analysis (OPTIMA), which she founded and heads, have been developing deep learning methods to not only detect retinal diseases at an early stage on high-resolution retinal scans, such as those taken millions of times in practice, and guide treatment through AI-based monitoring, but also to diagnose systemic diseases non-invasively. In cooperation with cardiologists, the researcher has now succeeded in using AI to detect not only stenoses, but also the degree of cardiovascular stenoses based solely on simple retinal images. Neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease can also be precisely identified using these new AI methods. This opens up a wide range of possible applications in the screening of large population groups in a painless, fast and cost-effective way. Schmidt-Erfurth has just received a multi-center EU grant (HORIZON) for the development of community-based screening at easily accessible non-medical locations such as opticians and pharmacies, as well as a WWTF "myheart" grant for the next four years.