Main achievements

• Creation of a collaborative, clinical research environment, the "Medical Imaging Data Lab", which facilitates privacy-preserving, data-driven research in the field of ocular diseases. The Medical Imaging Data Lab is a virtual laboratory where medical doctors and data scientists cooperate on the creation of novel AI models.
• Establishment of a General Consent procedure at the Jules-Gonin Eye Hospital, for the retrospective reuse of patient data, for research purposes. As of December 2023, 50'000 patients have been contacted, of which 28'000 have responded (with an 85% positive response rate).
• Creation of several patients datasets, including longitudinal imaging data for the following diseases: Glaucoma, Diabetes, Central Serous Chorioretinopathy, and Uveitis.
• Establishment of a collaboration between partner eye hospitals in Switzerland, namely in the cities of Lausanne (HOJG), Lucerne (LUKS), and Geneva (HUG). Thanks to these collaborations, (anonymized) patient data can flow into the Medical Imaging Data Lab and serve researchers around Switzerland.
• Commencement of a project to connect all the medical imaging devices within the Jules-Gonin Eye Hospital (i.e. the Gather project), with the objective to enable automatic extraction of real world patient data.
• Advancements in personalized eye care, specifically, utilization of Machine Learning (ML) on medical imaging for personalized care in chronic ocular diseases leveraging real world, clinical data from the sites mentioned above.
• Advancements in eye research, specifically: development of algorithms for the automatic extraction of hundreds of ocular biomarkers, and application of these tools to the analysis of hundreds of thousands of retinal images. These efforts enabled the development of predictive models for ocular diseases and identification of genetic mechanisms.

Reusable infrastructures and datasets