Australia to play role in IBM cognitive eye health project

Researchers at IBM Australia will play a role in building a "cognitive assistant" the IT giant hopes will help ophthalmologists diagnose eye conditions from medical image data. "IBM research is building the next generation cognitive assistant with advanced multi-media capability for early detection and management of diseases that can affect both the eyes and overall health of a person," the firm said in a now closed advertisement. Participating full and part-time interns would apply their clinical knowledge to analyse retinal image data and come up with "novel ideas and insights for cognition on this type of data". Back in June, IBM Australia revealed agreements with organisations including Melanoma Institute Australia to "apply cognitive computing to dermatology images" in the hope of earlier detection and identification of skin cancer.