A collaboration between Topcon Healthcare, BeekeeperAI and AiScreenings will work to upgrade and expand systems that assist in the early detection and management of eye diseases.
Medical tech company Topcon Healthcare (New Jersey, USA) has teamed up with artificial intelligence firms BeekeeperAI (Texas, USA) and AiScreenings (Paris, France) in a bid to upgrade their services to ophthalmologists and accelerate business development.
The three companies will collaborate in a range of areas from expertise, to data sharing and financing, with early projects aimed at expanding systems that assist in the early detection and management of eye diseases.
The collaboration will help to “accelerate a new wave of advanced AI solutions drawing insights from real-world data, while maintaining the highest levels of security, privacy, flexibility and efficiency,” said Ali Tafreshi, chief executive officer and president of Topcon Healthcare.
It will see Topcon’s Harmony, a web-based data management platform that connects ophthalmic instruments, eye care professionals and innovative technologies to help drive efficiency and accuracy in clinical workflows, combined with BeekeeperAI’s data protection platform EscrowAI.
One of the first projects this combination will assist is in enabling AiScreenings to validate its aiVista model on fundus photographs hosted on Topcon’s Harmony platform in the U.S. The EscrowAI platform will allow Topcon Healthcare to preserve the privacy of data while protecting the intellectual property of the AiScreening algorithm.
“BeeKeeperAI solves the fundamental problem of protecting the intellectual property of an AI model like aiVista as it travels to compute on data residing in a different country while enabling the data steward to retain control of the data and ensure protection of individual privacy,” said Michael Blum, managing director, co-founder and chief executive officer at BeeKeeperAI.
The partnership essentially creates a “secure collaboration network” between a healthcare solutions company, data stewards who utilize the Harmony platform, and AI developers, that reduces AI development and validation time, helping to get innovative products to market more quickly, he added.
As part of the partnership, Topcon Healthcare will also provide finance to BeeKeeperAI to support this work and further expansion of EscrowAI’s capabilities, and Tafreshi will join BeeKeeperAI’s board of directors.