In an enormous leap in medical imaging, Israeli startup AISAP today announced that it has secured $13 million in seed funding for its product: an AI-powered software platform that connects to common ultrasound wands and sensors to enable doctors to quickly assess patients' conditions – even doctors and healthcare professionals without formal training in analyzing ultrasound images.
AISAP's Point-of-Care Assisted Diagnosis (POCAD) provides ends in just five minutes, in comparison with other ultrasound procedures that may take hours and even days to supply results attributable to the provision of radiologists to interpret what is proscribed are images and the laboratories through which these images are processed.
“The problem we're coping with is definitely the incontrovertible fact that imaging is a scarce resource worldwide today and there isn't enough of it,” said Roni Attali, AISAP CEO and doctor of biotechnology, neurology and organic chemistry, in a Video call interview with VentureBeat yesterday.
The funding round for the two-year-old startup was raised by Harel Insurance Investments & Financial Services Ltd. and Shoni Health.
Founding and mission
AISAP was founded by a various group of experts in medicine, technology and intelligence, including Adiel Am-Shalom of the IDF's elite Unit 8200, Ehud Raanani, director of the Leviev Cardiocular and Thoracic Center at Israel's Sheba Medical Center, and Ehud Schwammenthal leader in echocardiography – the technique that uses ultrasound to scan the guts and analyze its health and condition.
Driven by the expertise and vision of its founders, the corporate's mission is initially focused on cardiac medicine with plans to expand into other medical areas.
“We want to supply doctors with information that is essential after a fast scan of 5, six, seven minutes, relatively than a 45-minute scan that you simply see within the echo labs that may take as much as an hour,” Robert Klempfner said , co-founder and chief medical officer of AISAP, in the identical video call with VentureBeat. “So we wish to be efficient and create a diagnosis that helps the user quickly get the gist of the data, after which the doctor can resolve on the bedside what they wish to do” to treat the patient – ​​including providing more comprehensive admissions and to acquire more accurate images or to intervene in an emergency.
A quicker initial diagnosis than traditional methods can mean the difference between life and death for some patients – potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals – especially in the case of an organ as vital as the guts.
This is how AISAP's POCAD system works
The POCAD software resides within the cloud but is encrypted and compliant with US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) laws. The company states that it’s ISO 13485 certified.
What is especially vital for doctors and health workers is that it may possibly be utilized in hospitals or in the sphere and is connected on the back end to common, existing ultrasound wands and sensors which can be already utilized by many emergency services.
“There is not any must buy latest equipment because hospitals have already got it,” Attali said.
POCAD is designed to be user-friendly for each doctor. It features an “urgency rating” to prioritize patient care based on disease severity and a high quality rating for the scans, ensuring reliable diagnosis even amongst less experienced operators.
The machine learning underlying POCAD was trained on 24 million echocardiogram video clips from greater than 300,000 studies provided by Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel.
“How can we summarize the knowledge of many cardiologists now we have at Sheba – hundreds of thousands of knowledge frames, cardiac images interpreted by top cardiologists and echocardiography experts?” Klempfner asked rhetorically. “How can we create a funnel and take all of this information and supply this information to assist the non-cardiologist at 2 a.m. within the emergency room, within the hospital ward, within the ICU?”
Pricing for the system is predicated on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription model, based on the variety of users at each customer, categorized into different categories
Convincing first results
A recent study at Israel's Sheba Medical Center, which remains to be under review, tested POCAD in emergency departments and internal medicine departments.
The results were convincing: at the least one moderate, previously undetected disease was present in 29% of the 660 patients who didn’t receive a comprehensive ultrasound examination.
Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad and current head of AISAP's Strategic Board, also highlighted the transformative potential of this technology: “The ability to make critical diagnoses anywhere, at any time, without the necessity for a dedicated expert, represents a paradigm shift “could save countless lives.”
With its latest assets and cutting-edge AI solution, AISAP goals to redefine the standards of medical diagnosis and make fast, accurate and accessible ultrasound examinations more widely available.
POCAD is now available in hospitals in Israel and AISAP plans to introduce it within the US pending FDA approval as soon as possible (ASAP).
