UMass Memorial forms collaboration on eye care

Photo | Grant Welker UMass Memorial Medical Center's Memorial Campus in Worcester

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UMass Memorial Health Care in Worcester is using a grant to help diagnose retinal diseases in a new partnership with the digital health company AEYE Health.

The collaboration with the Israeli company, which UMass Memorial announced Tuesday, includes two UMass Memorial departments: family medicine, and ophthalmology and visual sciences. The partnership will use funds from the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation, an entity bankrolling research projects between American and Israeli entities.

The initiative aims to help prevent avoidable blindness and save lives for at-risk patients using advanced machine learning techniques to be used in hospitals and health networks. AEYE Health aims to become the first to have a broad screening solution approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The UMass Memorial collaboration is one of 10 new projects receiving a combined $8 million. Two others included Massachusetts entities. One is with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston to develop a virtual reality platform to distract patients from pain while undergoing medical procedures, and the other includes Haystack Diagnostics in Brookline to develop a multi-electrode device to advance electrodiagnostic medicine.