ITRI TODAY Spring issue 2022

ITRI Named a Double Winner at Edison Awards 2022

The Edison Awards, one of the world’s most revered innovation awards, announced the 2022 winners during the awards ceremony this April in Fort Myers, Florida. At this year’s program, ITRI won two awards in the science & medical category: a silver for BioMS-Ti, a 3D printed bone implant for tissue integration, and a bronze for the diabetic retinopathy (DR) detection system Portable Edge AI-DR. This marks the sixth year that ITRI has won the honor, showing its creativity and consistency in innovating a better future. Other 2022 award winners include leading companies such as 3M, Abbott, Dow, and IBM.

“Being an Edison Awards winner is the number one honor for creating a successful, new game-changing product or service that makes people’s lives that much better. ITRI has by far outpaced the rest of our nominees with its continued work on innovating amongst many categories,” said Frank Bonafilia, Executive Director of the Edison Awards. He further commented on both ITRI winners. The BioMS-Ti solution, he stressed, uses new 3D printed materials that mimic real bone, producing a design appealing to the judges. Meanwhile, he said that the Portable Edge AI-DR, which employs artificial intelligence to look at diabetic retinopathy, is recognized to be ahead of the game and is wonderful for use by both medical doctors and non-doctors.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked the rise of digital health technologies and AI-enabled solutions. ITRI’s two winners at Edison Awards 2022 clearly demonstrate its acute awareness of market demands and both come from the field of Quality Health under ITRI’s 2030 Technology Strategy & Roadmap, which addresses the latest trends such as regenerative medicine and smart medical technologies.

Dr. Chii-Wann Lin, Vice President and General Director of ITRI’s Biomedical Technology and Device Research Laboratories, noted that BioMS-Ti can be tailored to each individual patient and speeds up bone repair, while the design allows for customized designs and a myriad of shapes and sizes such as bone screws, sacral plate, and interbody fusion cages, giving it high flexibility for various applications.

“Portable Edge AI-DR uses an AI-assisted diagnosis system to offer mobile services,” commented Dr. Pang-An Ting, ITRI’s General Director of Information and Communications Research Laboratories. “This can reduce the need for hospital visits for patients and enable early diagnosis to enhance preventive healthcare and public wellness,” he said.

About ITRI’s Winning Technologies

BioMS-Ti is a hybrid bionic skeleton structure that is manufactured through SLM 3D printing technology. The bio-active cannulated implant has a controllable porous structure design and can be combined with bio-ceramic or osteogenic materials to accelerate bone regeneration and integration of hard/soft tissue interface. The customized designing and manufacturing processes give it tremendous potential as personalized, precision medical implants in orthopedics, dentistry, and aesthetic medicine. BioMS-Ti has been licensed to Ingrowth Biotech Co. Ltd. for the design and manufacture of ligament bone nails and to BlueLab Inc. for producing interbody fusion cages.

Portable Edge AI-DR is an AI-assisted system to detect diabetic retinopathy (DR). It can locate four main lesions, classify five severity levels of diabetic retinopathy, and assist physicians in diagnoses of DR, providing advanced care for diabetic eye complication patients in a portable medical device and reducing the need for inconvenient referrals to ophthalmologists for patients with mild DR. ITRI collaborated with medical device designer and manufacturer Medimaging Integrated Solution Inc. (MiiS) to develop the portable solution, including the handheld fundus camera and AI edge computer.