You fund researchers to test out these 17 possibilities to find out which one is the best. Or maybe the Qualcomm Xprize for the tricorder.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/medymatch-aims-to-offer-second-opinion-in-stroke-diagnosis/
The real life Dr. Shepherds – yes, this is a
reference to the popular medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy” – who work in
hospitals around the world may soon get a new assistant. No, not just
another intern but an extra pair of virtual eyes to help them better
diagnose stroke victims.
Tel Aviv-based MedyMatch Technology Ltd.,
which hopes to have its first commercially available product as soon as
the first half of 2017, is developing an artificial intelligence (AI)
platform for critical areas of patient care. The platform is meant to
help study data more quickly and accurately than the human eye, and help
physicians with their clinical decisions in a wide set of healthcare
issues.
MedyMatch’s first area of focus will be for stroke patients.
“Speed is essential in treating stroke,” Gene
Saragnese, MedyMatch chairman & CEO, said in an interview. “For
every minute that ticks by, brain cells die.”
When dealing with stroke, the very first
question doctors need to address is what kind of stroke they are seeing:
is it a bleed in the brain or a blockage that prevents blood flowing to
the brain? The two types of stroke are treated in a very different
manner. A wrong diagnosis and treatment could mean the death of
much-needed brain cells.
“Our goal is to make better decisions in that
very first step in a stroke – so those patients can get moved into the
appropriate treatment quickly,” Saragnese said.
The product is software that takes images from
a standard CT machine and processes them in the cloud, using
proprietary algorithms developed by MedyMatch. The software makes notes
on the image, highlights areas for physicians so they can immediately
see potential areas of bleeding – and sends the image back to the
doctor’s workstation, together with the original.
The process is expected to enable doctors to
get an expert opinion within three to five minutes, Saragnese said. With
deep learning a series of examples are fed to the computer to set
benchmarks for what is considered a baseline reading, said Saragnese, a
former CEO of Philips Imaging Systems who joined MedyMatch as CEO in
February. Then you upload a whole series of images to the computer – and
the machine learns what a bleed looks like from those images.
Basically, “you are training the computer with examples in a way that it
can then start to read images by itself,” he said.
MedyMatch has secured billions of images from
millions of cases via collaborations with hospitals in Israel and the
US, including Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston. “Those places are where our experts are
coming from. They help us train the software to read,” Saragnese said.
Stroke is the fourth-biggest killer in the US,
and costs to treat stroke may increase from $71.6 billion in 2010 to
about $183 billion by 2030, according to data published by the American
Heart Association. Despite advances in medical imaging, the medical
misdiagnosis error rate of around 30 percent rate has not changed for
decades, said Dr. Gabriel Polliack, a director of strategy development
at TEREM, a network of emergency medical centers in Israel.
“There is a need in the marketplace to provide
radiologists and physicians a second set of eyes to help them overcome
any limitation that is preventing them from providing a correct patient
diagnosis,” said Polliack said. Polliack is a member of MedyMatch’s
medical advisory board and has been actively advising the company since
its founding over two years ago.
“The idea is great, and not only has
significant clinical value, meaning improvement of patient outcomes, but
it will have a direct impact on the cost of care,” Polliack said. “This
means that MedyMatch is addressing the holy grail in the medical
profession, that is, providing better patient outcomes while lowering
the costs.”
MedyMatch is in the process of raising an
additional $8 million in funding, after it completed an initial
financing round of $2 million earlier this year, Saragnese said. Its
product will need to get FDA and other approvals.
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