(Vienna/San Francisco, 21 November 2023) Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth, Head of MedUni Vienna's Department of Ophthalmology and Optometry, has been awarded the prestigious Arnall Platz Medal by the American Academy of Ophthalmology for her pioneering achievements in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare via the analysis of retinal images and delivered this year's Arnall Platz Lecture at the society's Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Since 2013, Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth and the research group for ophthalmological image analysis (OPTIMA), which she founded and heads, have been developing deep learning methods to not only detect retinal diseases at an early stage on high-resolution retinal scans, such as those taken millions of times in practice, and guide treatment through AI-based monitoring, but also to diagnose systemic diseases non-invasively. In cooperation with cardiologists, the researcher has now succeeded in using AI to detect not only stenoses, but also the degree of cardiovascular stenoses based solely on simple retinal images. Neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease can also be precisely identified using these new AI methods. This opens up a wide range of possible applications in the screening of large population groups in a painless, fast and cost-effective way. Schmidt-Erfurth has just received a multi-center EU grant (HORIZON) for the development of community-based screening at easily accessible non-medical locations such as opticians and pharmacies, as well as a WWTF "myheart" grant for the next four years.
About the person
Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth is Professor of Ophthalmology and an expert in eye surgery. She has headed MedUni Vienna's Department of Ophthalmology and Optometry at Vienna General Hospital since 2004, the Vienna Reading Center since 2006 and the AI-based Laboratory for Ophthalmic Image Analysis (OPTIMA) set up at MedUni Vienna in 2013. She is the author of more than 560 publications and book chapters and a member of numerous editorial boards of specialist journals (e.g. British Journal of Ophthalmology).
Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth has received numerous awards and honors, including the Research Award of the Fraunhofer Society, the Achievement Award of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the Roger Johnson Award of the University of Washington and the Donald Gass Award of the Retina Society (USA). Schmidt-Erfurth has been an adjunct professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine (Northwestern University, Chicago) since 2014. Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2018, she was awarded the J. Donald M. Gass Medal by the international Macula Society in Los Angeles for outstanding achievements in the field of ophthalmology.