On May 8, 2025, VisioMed.AI co-founder Mikhail Kulyabin defended his doctoral thesis at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and was awarded a Ph.D. His thesis, “Artificial Intelligence for Detection and Control of Retinal and Neurodevelopmental Disorders”, was written at Prof. Andreas Maier’s Pattern Recognition Lab and tackles the same problem as our product: analysing ophthalmic data with artificial intelligence.
The thesis classifies electroretinography signals to diagnose AMD and diabetic retinopathy using a continuous wavelet transform and a Vision Transformer, and uses ERG recordings from children in Australia and England to detect autism spectrum disorder. It also contributes an open dataset of 2,000 OCT images from more than 800 patients across six disease categories, and a human-in-the-loop method for labelling cone photoreceptors in adaptive optics (AOSLO) images that cuts down manual work.
“A Ph.D. is not just about research and writing papers. It’s about meeting inspiring people, building valuable connections, and growing both personally and professionally,” says Mikhail. He thanks Prof. Andreas Maier, the entire Pattern Recognition Lab and FAU for the opportunity, the researchers he worked with, and his family and friends for their support.
lme.tf.fau.de