EyeMatics On-Site Meeting in Münster

From June 11 to 12, Hertie AI PhD Sarah Müller attended the EyeMatics consortium gathered in Münster for a two-day in-person meeting. It was the first time the entire team had met in person since the project's kickoff in April 2024. EyeMatics is a nationwide German project building a multi-site dataset from the routine care and treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), combining OCT imaging with visual acuity measurements from clinics across Germany. The goal is to model AMD progression, including the effect of intravitreal injection (IVI) therapy, and ultimately to simulate how this treatment influences disease course.

The first evening began with dinner at a restaurant by the Aasee. After more than a year of remote collaboration, it was a warm reunion with good conversation.

The second day was full of presentations. Our talk covered the current state of our work package on data analysis and biomarkers. We presented data analysis of the first development dataset from the Tübingen University Eye Clinic (currently the only site available), including our work on extracting visual acuity measurements from the free-text metadata provided by the clinics. We also introduced the deep survival analysis framework we have developed, which we plan to apply to the EyeMatics dataset and extend to incorporate IVI interventions. As a first step, we aim to model the progression of visual acuity over time using OCT images as input. Among the many other talks, a few highlights: Eva Kobak (Tübingen) and Nils Freyer (Aachen) showed a first version of the data demonstrator to visualize cross-site data analysis and to search for similar patients, Prof. Dr. med. Alexander Schuster (Mainz) presented an initial analysis of the EyeMatics questionnaire, an add-on to routine care at participating clinics, and Tim Freisenich (Münster) gave a helpful overview of comparable projects that underlined EyeMatics' particular strengths in biomarker analysis and high-quality data.

Overall, a productive meeting that sharpened both our modeling plans and our sense of where EyeMatics stands out from related work.