MedyMatch aims to offer second opinion in stroke diagnosis

It would be much more useful to get to an objective diagnosis of stroke, Get the damned neurologists out of the loop. This assumes that even for young patients there already is a tentative diagnosis for stroke. That is not currently  the case considering all the misdiagnosed young patients.
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.