The deal is expected to bring the MedyMatch application to hospitals worldwide
Orange County, CA -
March 17th 2017 - MedyMatch Technology has announced their collaboration with IBM Watson Health to incorporate their artificial intelligence based application, which assists physicians in making medical decisions, into the emergency room. The two companies have reached a five-year licensing agreement where IBM Watson Health's Imaging group will integrate the MedyMatch brain bleed analysis application to its hospitals worldwide, prior to expanding the interoperability between MedyMatch's application and IBM Watson Health imaging.
The American Stroke Association lists stroke as the fifth leading cause of death in the United States with an expected rate of approximately 3.4 million stroke victims annually by 2030. The association advocates for the prompt identification of intracranial bleeding after a hemorrhagic stroke in the minimization long-term effects and preventing death. Brain cells continuously die after the occurrence of a bleed in the brain, making early detection equipment indispensable.
MedyMatch, which launched last year, intends to integrate cognitive tools into daily routines of physicians to assist in critical decision making. This tool in particular is able to identify the potentially bleeding areas of the brain after experiencing head trauma or stroke. After undergoing a CT scan in hospital, that information is sent by way of the cloud to a processor. Using deep learning, patient data, and clinical insights, the application is programmed to read the image and display possible locations of cerebral bleeding for physician review.
To help train the software to detect bleeding in the brain, MedyMatch gained access to images from millions of cases from hospitals in Israel and the US. Experts from Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston were of the participating hospitals and are currently helping improve the software.
"The implementation of A.I. based computer aided detection and clinical decision support tools to medicine in general, and to the emergency department, in particular, has the potential to increase the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of patient management, " said Michael Lev, M.D., director of emergency radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. He also stated its, “potential to ultimately reduce diagnostic errors and [improve] clinical outcomes.”The MedyMatch intracranial bleed assessment application is currently under clinical evaluation and working to gain a PMA Class III approval from U S Food and Drug Administration. The IBM deal isn’t an exclusive offer and MedyMatch is communicating with other potential partners at this time. They expect their first product to be commercially available by the end of the year.
