Ocutrx Eyes Telemedicine Market With Advisory Boards Appointment

Ocutrx Vision Technologies LLC, an Irvine, Calif.-based technology company developing augmented reality (AR) headsets, has appointed Dr. Daniel Ting, M.D., Ph.D., to the company’s International Medical Advisory Board as well as the organization’s newly formed International Scientific Advisory Board. The company manufactures both the Oculenz AR headset for low-vision patients, and the AR ORLenz for surgeons, assistants, and interventional radiologist and medical telemedicine.

Dr. Ting will serve as a critical voice and visionary for the company as Ocutrx moves forward with new innovations merging medical data, artificial intelligence (AI), and AR technologies for the healthcare space. While currently in a nascent stage, medical data analytics and AI for surgeries are poised to quickly become a major medical field; as data collected before, during and after surgeries has the potential to be critically analyzed for predictive database use in AR applications.  
 
“The rapid development of AI and machine learning technology in healthcare, particularly in deep learning, will revolutionize how medicine is practiced in the next few decades,” said Michael Freeman, Ocutrx CEO and chief technology officer. “Having the next generation of scientists like Dr Ting, who has breadth and domain expertise in both AI and medicine, is essential for Ocutrx Vision Technologies as the company aims to harness data and AI for the medial augmented reality space. The COVID-19 pandemic is showing how our AR headset can break new ground for telemedicine and AI – imagine practicing medicine remotely with an AR headset and seeing patients virtually.”
 
Dr Ting is a firmly established global opinion leader, physician-surgeon and scientist-innovator who has already made contributions in developing planet-wide programs based on AI for ophthalmology, and, in particular, retina. To date, Ting has published 176 peer-reviewed journal papers, conference abstracts, book chapters and educational articles, including more than 30 articles related to AI in medical journals such as JAMA, Nature Medicine, Nature Digital Medicine, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Lancet Digital Health, Progress in Retinal and Eye Research (featuring a major AI review article with other global AI experts in ophthalmology), Ophthalmology, JAMA Ophthalmology, BJO, MICCAI, ACCV, IAAI and more.
 
“The opportunity to join the Ocutrx family arose in 2019 when their impressive leadership team—including CSSO Dr. Linda Lam, CEO Michael Freeman and CCO Victoria McArtor—approached me with their global vision at a London Retina conference. Ocutrx’s portfolio and the company’s ARWear for patients and surgery were truly impressive—as was their vision for AI, AR and medicine. It became immediately clear to me that this company was at the forefront of technology innovation in the fields of low vision and retinal impairment with their Oculenz ARWear headset as well as their impressive ORLenz surgical visualization and telemedicine technology.”
 
As the SNEC/SERI clinical lead for AI in ophthalmology, Dr. Ting has received more than $1.5 million as the principal investigator and $25 million as co-investigator/collaborator research funding for his AI work. At the global AI ophthalmology setting, Dr. Ting has led two major AI review articles with other companies in the AI field (including Google AI, Deepmind), summarizing the state-of-art AI technologies, the key technical and clinical aspects and the unmet needs in AI ophthalmology. At present, he has filed two AI patents on deep learning and eye diseases. With his track records in AI innovation for retina, he is currently the AI and medical data editor for Ophthalmology, Ophthalmology Retina, Ophthalmology Glaucoma, and the British Journal of Ophthalmology. In 2019, he became the founding executive member of the AAO AI Taskforce to help shape and design the guideline and framework for AI applications in ophthalmology practice and surgery.
 
“In my role at Ocutrx, I hope to inject novel AI and image processing learning to enhance the precision and adaptation of next generation Ocutrx AR technologies for both patients and surgeons. For instance, given the current paradigm shift in healthcare toward home monitoring, Ocutrx’s augmented reality/mixed reality medical headsets will be a major factor in the space. The Oculenz AR headset can serve as a robust platform to collect data based on patients’ home-testing, activities and behaviors, as well as collecting information on the progression or remission of their disease—which can be more reflective of their well-being than  compared to the 15-30 minutes spent in the consultation rooms with the doctors.” Dr. Ting said.  “With this real-time information from Ocutrx AR, AI techniques can help predict which patients need immediate medical attention, and which patients can remain monitored from home, which has the potential to dramatically cut healthcare costs.”
 
Dr. Ting is a consultant vitreo-retinal surgeon at the Singapore National Eye Center (SNEC) and an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. In 2017, he was selected as the U.S. J. William Fulbright Scholar Award recipient and undertook a post-doctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Applied Physics Laboratory to deepen his understanding on the application of artificial intelligence in ophthalmology. In 2019, he was also appointed as the visiting full professor to Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center (ZOC) at Sun-Yet-Sun University (currently ranked first for ophthalmology in China).