Hrvoje Bogunovic, Assistant Professor at MedUni Vienna’s Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Medical Data Science, has been awarded a "Consolidator Grant" from the European Research Council (ERC) with funding of ¤2 million over five years for his The HealthAEye project aims to develop a novel AI-first imaging technology with the goal of enabling portable home monitoring solution for retinal diseases.
One of the biggest opportunities for artificial intelligence (AI) in Medicine comes from its ability to reveal complex patterns. This will be exploited in the project to detect retinal imaging biomarkers that are hidden in plain sight, too subtle to be picked up by the naked eye, but salient enough to be caught by a trained AI system. The project will provide a proff-of-concept and lay a computational foundation to enable smartphone-based fundus imaging to serve as a powerful health monitoring tool. It will advance the methodology of AI for medical imaging, to be able to detect subtle longitudinal changes and properly express confidence in the detection. The success of the project will open the path toward an accessible and scalable technology that can be used at home, to help provide timely treatment and consequently improve outcomes for millions of patients with retinal disease. However, the long-term ambitions go even beyond this as the human retina stands out as an invaluable window into one’s health, shown to reflect not only ocular diseases but also those of many organ systems, allowing ultimately for systemic health home monitoring with AI-powered portable imaging.
About the person
Hrvoje Bogunovic studied computer science at the University of Zagreb (Croatia) and completed his PhD in artificial intelligence (AI) for medical imaging at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). He subsequently joined the University of Iowa (Iowa City, US) as a postdoc, where he started to specialize in AI methodologies with applications in retinal image analysis. In 2015, he joined the Medical University of Vienna, where in an interdisciplinary environment of the Department of Ophthalmology he advanced AI methods for retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT). Since 2021 he has been leading the Christian Doppler Lab for Artificial Intelligence in Retina and in 2024 he took up a tenure-track Assistant Professorship for Medical Image Computing at the AI Institute, Center for Medical Data Science.
