TeraRecon announced the acquisition of machine learning firm McCoy Medical Technologies at the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine’s Annual Meeting (SIIM17) in Pittsburgh.

TeraRecon and McCoy will form a new company to develop artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, provisionally named WIA Corporation. WIA will focus on integrating the work of end users, machine learning researchers, open source organizations, and diagnostic image companies—an endeavor made easier with the McCoy platform, which allows developers to remotely access cloud-based algorithms without compromising patient health information.

Jeff Sorenson, TeraRecon president and CEO, said “The new company’s platform is open to everyone, from individual physician-inventors, to research institutions, and the world’s largest PACS vendors alike. Together, this new company becomes a catalyst to join the various AI communities together. Our goal is to incubate and accelerate a new kind of AI platform that allows a proven algorithm to be productized in 20 minutes.”

Part of the deal includes migrating the McCoy Medical advisory board to WIA, including the University of Maryland’s Professor Eliot Siegel, MD, Professor Paul Chang, MD, of the University of Chicago, and Khan Siddiqui, MD, chief technical officer at Higi, a consumer wellness company based in Chicago.

“This decade has seen a proliferation of extremely impressive applications leveraging machine learning, especially for computer vision. Today, there is a real need for simpler, standards-based channels to socialize, access and apply these technologies,” said Siegel. “The TeraRecon and McCoy venture holds great potential to be among the first to develop and commercialize their offerings in the form of a truly open platform community. This kind of approach is exactly what is needed for the amazing innovations in AI to achieve widespread utilization.”