The American College of Radiology Data Science Institute (ACR DSI)  and the American Academy of Ophthalmology announce a collaboration that will expand ACR DSI’s AI-LAB platform to include eye care. Leveraging use cases and data from the academy, this collaboration will accelerate the use of machine learning in the ophthalmic industry to the benefit of patients across the globe.

“We’ve now made it easier for the ophthalmology community to access real world examples for our own use cases. By working together with ACR, we are leveraging a platform developed for the radiology community to educate our own community about AI development and encouraging new AI to be developed that will benefit our specialty,” says Tamara R. Fountain, MD, president of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

The academy will provide the ophthalmology content and the ACR will provide the IT infrastructure to integrate the use cases and datasets into the landmark AI-LAB. This enables developers to build algorithms that include defined data elements and images useful for training and testing models. The academy’s Committee on Artificial Intelligence, chaired by J. Pete Campbell, MD, MPH is leading this initiative.

“This is another vital step toward making the groundbreaking AI-LAB platform the central hub for medical artificial intelligence algorithm development,” says Bibb Allen, Jr., MD, FACR, chief medical officer of the ACR DSI. “By sharing the AI-LAB as a resource for other medical communities, the ACR DSI supports efficient development of AI algorithms that can advance modern patient care.”

The ACR DSI made the initial version of the AI development framework available in April 2019.