By GREGORY ZELLER //
Northwell Health and friends have flipped the switch on a retinal-imaging, disease-preventing startup leveraging an artificial intelligence tech developed down under.
Say g’day to Optain, an artificial-intelligence company aiming for early identification of different diseases through advanced retinal imaging.
The New York City-based startup was officially introduced Tuesday by Ascertain, a unique AI-development collaboration combining the might of New York City-based company-creation platform Aegis Ventures and Northwell Holdings, the New Hyde Park-based health system’s for-profit investment subsidiary.
Optain traces its roots to Eyetelligence, a 2019 Australian startup that commercializes the inventions of Minggguang He, a researcher at the University of Melbourne and the Centre for Eye Research Australia.
Jeff Dunkel: Eye eye.
Eyetelligence has developed a suite of clinically validated, regulatory-approved AI products already commercialized in the Australian, New Zealand, European, Japanese and Middle Eastern markets. Optain will bring the tech to U.S. markets, with Northwell Health stepping up as its “flagship commercial customer,” according to the new company.
To really get the eyeballs rolling, Ascertain also announced a $12 million seed investment in the domestic startup – marking the first launch in the partnership’s AI-focused portfolio.
Optain CEO Jeff Dunkel considers it a wise investment, particularly with a new healthcare industry-wide emphasis on preventative care at odds with a current crop of “expensive and inaccessible” eye-diagnostic technologies.
“The healthcare industry has made a concerted effort in recent years to shift treatment from reactive sick care to proactive preventive care,” Dunkel said Tuesday. “Optain will accelerate that shift and make ‘preventive care’ ubiquitous by placing smarter, faster and more efficient diagnostic tools in the hands of clinicians everywhere.”
Those tools include AI-enabled portable retinal cameras designed to help clinicians screen for 140-plus eye and optical-system conditions – including dysfunctions in the earliest stages of development, a distinct treatment advantage that both reduces wasteful spending and improves patient outcomes.
This unique use of AI technologies made Optain an ideal opening target for Ascertain, which launched last year specifically to identify and supercharge such opportunities. (For those keeping score, Northwell Holdings and Aegis Ventures officially broke the ice in November, when they announced a rollout investment in women’s care specialist Upliv, while Optain marks Ascertain’s first AI-centric investment).
Optain also heralds significant treatment upgrades in its flagship client’s statewide clinics, according to Northwell Health Senior Vice President Richard Braunstein, who trumpeted the “tremendous insight that can be gained through retinal scanning and combining that with innovative AI.”
“Optain’s technology represents enormous potential to improve the manner and timeliness in which we can diagnose and treat disease,” added Braunstein, also Northwell’s executive director of ophthalmology. “We believe that leveraging Northwell’s clinical expertise, data assets and vast clinical footprint positions us well to refine and advance such groundbreaking solutions.”
