Photo: /KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/GettyImages
True-See, a medical photography company, announced a strategic partnership with Dr. Peter Chang and the Center for Applied AI Research (A2IR) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
True-See's medical photography platform works with mobile devices and integrates with electronic health records. The company helps healthcare professionals make clinical decisions based on wound image records.
As part of the collaboration, True-See named Dr. Chang, the director of A2IR and associate professor of radiological sciences and computer science at UCI, to its clinical advisory board.
The collaboration aims to have Dr. Chang and his team work with True-See and use its proprietary database of more than two million color-accurate medical photographs.
According to True-See, the next step will be to develop next-generation AI clinical decision support tools for applications for wound care, dermatology, plastic surgery and other medical specialties.
The alliance will build upon True-See's technology and A2IR's AI and clinical proficiency, leveraging tools such as vision language models and large language models.
Over 18 months, True-See and Dr. Chang's team will compile and clarify True-See's image repository of 2.1 million calibrated images.
The aim is to create gold-standard training datasets; read and verify AI models that identify, categorize and look at external injuries and lesions; and pilot integrated decision support tools within UCI Health's clinical workflows.
"Remote patient monitoring allows patients who cannot get into a clinic to have accurate color calibrated photos that represent the live observation of the patient taken by the patient or by the clinician and then have AI tools that can help analyze those and provide physicians with clinical decision support," Ben Favret, CEO of True-See, told MobiHealthNews.
Favret added that True-See provides a verifiable accurate photo that you can then use to train AI to make those photo differentiations.
"We have a system that calibrates the photos and standardizes how those photos are acquired," he said.
Favret said the privately held company is in the process of raising capital.
THE LARGER TREND
Other companies in the clinical medical photography space include QuantifiCare, which provides 2D and 3D photography and videography for use in dermatology, wound care and infectious diseases.
In April, QuantifiCare won a legal victory against competitor Canfield Scientific. A court in Germany ruled that Canfield Scientific's Vectra H2 device infringed QuantifiCare's European patent, which protects the LifeViz Infinity system, according to QuantifiCare.
Canfield Scientific provides imaging systems for scientific healthcare, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical and skin industries.
A study published in the Interactive Journal of Medical Research in 2022 noted that the use of photography in routine clinical practice holds the promise of increasing the efficiency of overall patient care as well as improving clinical documentation and provider-to-provider communication.
However, the study authors concluded that "challenges remain that hinder the successful incorporation of medical photography into clinical practice, often because of inconsistent structure and implementation."
