This talk was recorded live at ARVO 2024 in Seattle, WA.

Join this invigorating talk where our rising medical student James Lai (moderator) and Dr. Gagan Kalra (founder) discuss innovation in ophthalmology with strategic funding, research, and advocacy with Dr. Michael F. Chiang, Dr. Daniel Pelaez, Dr. Whitney Sambhariya and Dan Ignaszewski.

This podcast is in collaboration with NAEVR. The National Alliance for Eye and Vision Research (NAEVR), a 501(c)(4) non-profit advocacy organization, constitutes a coalition of nearly 50 professional, patient, consumer, and industry organizations actively engaged in the realm of eye and vision research.

Learn about NAEVR's emerging vision scientist program here: https://www.eyeresearch.org/emerging-vision-scientist-program

NEI's strategic plan is discussed in this podcast. Here is a reference for your further reading interests:

https://www.nei.nih.gov/sites/default/files/2021-10/NEI-StrategicPlan-ExecutiveSummary-508c.pdf

This from the vaults episode was held live on April 2, 2022.
What’s happening with AI and biomedical imaging for the eye? Hear from and ask our experts, Jennifer I. Lim at University of Illinois at Chicago and Minhaj N. Alam at Stanford School of Medicine.
Chat soon, and bring your favorite beverage!

Dr. Lim is a leading authority on retina and vitreoretinal diseases. She has performed more than 6,000 vitreoretinal surgeries and directed more than 50 clinical research studies and trials on age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, macular edema and retinal vein occlusion and complex retinal detachments. Her research and patient care have generated more than 220 peer-reviewed journal articles. Dr. Lim has been named Chicago Super Doctors and Best Doctors in America. Her book, Age-Related Macular Degeneration, is in its 3rd Edition and was published in 2013. Dr. Lim is the recipient of the American Academy of Ophthalmology Senior Achievement and Secretariat Awards, ASRS Senior Honor Award and the Suzanne Veronneau Troutman Award. Dr. Lim is board certified in ophthalmology. Dr. Minhaj Nur Alam is a biomedical imaging and computer vision scientist with expertise in the field of biomedical imaging and medical artificial intelligence (AI). He has extensive research experience in developing AI models for medical AI tasks, optical device instrumentation (optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT/OCTA)), and developing quantitative imaging biomarkers. Dr. Alam trained as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford University department of Biomedical Data Science with a research focus on developing self-supervised and cross-modal prediction models in ophthalmology and radiology applications. He was also part of a stealth mode AI startup that focused on sensorless biomarker detection for health analytics. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), with a focus on optical imaging and AI based objective classification of different types of retinopathies.

In this 3rd and final part of the 3 part deep dive with ⁠Dr. Michael Abramoff⁠,⁠ Dr. Gagan Kalra⁠ (host) delves into the regulatory processes and ethics of medical AI with Dr. Abramoff.

Dr. Michael Abramoff, MD, PhD, (FARVO) is the Robert C. Watzke, MD Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Iowa, with a joint appointment in the College of Engineering, a fellowship-trained retina specialist, computer scientist, and entrepreneur. He is an IEEE Fellow, and an ARVO Gold Fellow. In 1989-1990, he did a postdoc at the RIKEN neural networks research lab in Japan. As an expert in machine learning and image analysis, Dr. Abramoff was one of the original developers of a widely-used open-source image analysis app, ImageJ. His research has been continuously funded since 2004 by National Eye Institute, the Veterans Administration, the Beckman Foundation and other federal, state and philanthropic funding agencies in the U.S. and Europe.

Dr. Abramoff is the Founder and Executive Chairman of ⁠Digital Diagnostics⁠, the Autonomous AI diagnostics company that was the first in any field of medicine to get FDA clearance for an autonomous AI. In primary care, the AI system can instantaneously diagnose diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema at the point of care. This device, IDX-DR, is now part of ADA’s Standard Diabetes Care and Dr. Abramoff has also developed an ethical foundation for autonomous AI that was used during the design, validation, and regulatory and payment pathways for autonomous AI. As the author of over 300 peer-reviewed publications in this field, he has been cited over 35,000 times, and is the inventor on 17 issued patents and many patent applications. Dr. Abramoff has mentored dozens of engineering graduate students, ophthalmology residents, and retina fellows. His passion is to use AI to improve the affordability, accessibility and quality of care.