BeeKeeperAI, Topcon Healthcare Collaborating on Optical Diagnostics

BeeKeeperAI Inc. is teaming up with Topcon Healthcare Inc. to better detect and manage eye diseases. The collaboration will combine Topcon’s digital health information platform (Harmony) with BeeKeeperAI’s EscrowAI software to more easily compute and analyze eye imaging data.

“Accelerating innovation while maintaining data security and patient privacy are critical to our mission of empowering healthcare providers with better tools that improve eyecare and overall health,” Topcon Healthcare President/CEO Ali Tafreshi said. “Through our collaboration with BeeKeeperAI, we are helping accelerate a new wave of advanced AI solutions drawing insights from real-world data, while maintaining the highest levels of security, privacy, flexibility, and efficiency.”

One of the initial projects is enabling French-based AiScreenings to validate its aiVista model on fundus photographs hosted on the Harmony platform in the United States. BeeKeeperAI’s EscrowAI platform will allow Topcon Healthcare to preserve the privacy of data while protecting the AiScreening algorithm’s intellectual property.

“Validating our algorithm for approval in the U.S. market has been challenging. The privacy-enhancing collaboration platform provided by BeeKeeperAI provides computing access to Topcon Healthcare’s fundus photographs, enabling us to accelerate our time to market in the U.S.,” AiScreening CEO Arnaud Lambert stated.

“BeeKeeperAI solves the fundamental problem of protecting the intellectual property of an AI model like aiVista as it travels to compute on data residing in a different country, while enabling the data steward to retain control of the data and ensure protection of individual privacy. By integrating our EscrowAI platform into Topcon Healthcare’s Harmony data environment, we have created a new model for protecting sensitive data access and algorithm intellectual property end-to-end. This new approach accelerates real-world AI development and deployment,” BeeKeeperAI Co-Founder/CEO Michael Blum, M.D., commented. “With our Topcon Healthcare partnership, we have created a secure collaboration network consisting of a healthcare solutions company, data stewards who utilize the Harmony platform, and AI developers. Our distributed, privacy-enhancing infrastructure streamlines real-world data and AI collaborations, both single and federated, reducing AI development and validation time, and helping to get these innovative products to market more quickly.”

As part of the partnership, Topcon Healthcare is participating in BeeKeeperAI’s financing round to support this work and further expand EscrowAI’s capabilities. Additionally, Tafreshi will be joining BeeKeeperAI’s Board of Directors. Further, the partnership will leverage Microsoft Azure confidential computing to accelerate healthcare from the eye initiative.

“Since BeeKeeperAI’s inception and participation in the Microsoft for Startups Pegasus program, the team at Microsoft has believed in the promise of their distributed, privacy enhancing computing platform. This collaboration with Topcon Healthcare demonstrates that it is no longer necessary to share or move data to support AI-powered innovation that is trustworthy and responsible. Rather, confidential computing occurs where the data lives. This is a significant milestone for accelerating AI innovation in healthcare and other regulated data industries,” said David Rhew, M.D., global chief medical officer and vice president for Healthcare at Microsoft.

Harmony hosts millions of patients’ data and images in Microsoft’s Azure cloud environment, providing powerful, efficient storage and computing for the extremely large data and image store. BeeKeeperAI’s EscrowAI platform is also Azure native and provides end-to-end data, image, and algorithm encryption as well as processor-based trusted execution environments to deliver confidential computing environments in Azure with complete data and algorithms protection.

BeeKeeperAI develops and deploys confidential, multi-party AI development and deployment workflows. Its EscrowAI software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for regulated industries integrates and automates the use of privacy-enhancing technologies, including Trusted Execution Environments with confidential computing. BeeKeeperAI’s mission is to accelerate the broader availability of AI-powered solutions that redefine the future of healthcare and commerce.

Topcon Healthcare Inc. is part of Topcon Corporation, a provider of digital healthcare solutions whose vision is to improve access and healthcare quality while decreasing costs. To achieve this vision, the company created Healthcare from the Eye, which applies AI models to eye imaging data to facilitate earlier disease detection and management. Healthcare from the Eye is powered by Harmony, a cloud-based, vendor-inclusive digital health information platform enabling a connected care ecosystem.