TORONTO – On average, radiology specialists diagnose fewer than 50% of cases of collapsed lung or pneumothorax using chest X-rays, said systems design engineer Hamid Tizhoosh. The Insignio system developed at Tizhoosh's Kitchener, Ontario-based Kimia Lab has gone further by identifying 75% of cases of collapsed lungs using artificial intelligence (AI) to search a database of 550,000 patients and compare 30,000 cases of pneumothorax there to X-rays of new patients with unknown conditions.
PARIS – A French research consortium bringing together the firm Cap Gemini SE, the Traumabase (traumabase.eu) network, the AP-HP group of 39 teaching hospitals in the Paris region, the École Polytechnique, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), is developing the first AI decision-making tool for managing patients with severe trauma in their first 24 hours.
LONDON – The EU's next large-scale public-private research partnership in health is taking shape and due for launch at the start of 2021, succeeding the current €3.6 billion (US$4 billion) Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2).
Tech giant Google LLC is taking aim at the Apple Watch with its plan to acquire wearables pioneer Fitbit Inc., of San Francisco, for $2.1 billion, or $7.35 per share, in an all-cash transaction expected to close sometime next year.
HONG KONG – South Korean AI-based biotech Azoth Bio Inc., of Seongnam, Gyeonggi-do, and biopharmaceutical venture Wellmarker Bio Co. Ltd., based in Seoul, have signed a memorandum of understanding for cancer drug R&D and commercialization. Under the agreement, the two entities will use Azoth's AI-powered platform to develop Wellmarker's cancer treatment candidates.
TORONTO – Health Canada has granted a medical license to Toronto-based pharmaceuticals company Hls Therapeutics Inc. for a device that simplifies blood monitoring for patients suffering from treatment-resistant schizophrenia (TRS).
Deciding which patients should go into the intensive care unit (ICU) after surgery is a difficult call and typically made entirely at the surgeon's discretion. The result is that surgeons typically err on the side of caution by putting more post-operative patients in the ICU than necessary. To aid in better ICU decision-making, physicians at New York University Langone Hospital System (NYU Langone) developed a machine learning algorithm that combs through a patient's electronic medical record to identify relevant factors to determine if they needed the ICU after surgery.
LONDON – The World Health Organization (WHO) aims to hit back at anti-vaccination campaigners and take a role in ensuring the safety of consumer-targeted health apps, as part of a broader push to exert more influence in shaping digital technologies to meet global public health needs.
Los Altos, Calif.-based Heartvista Inc. has received the U.S. FDA's nod for its One Click autonomous MRI acquisition software for cardiac exams. The company said that One Click is the first artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted solution designed specifically with the goal of enhancing the performance and results of cardiac MRI scans.
Radiologists review thousands of images a day. The hope is that artificial intelligence (AI) applications will become useful soon to verify diagnoses, prioritize queued images and even to offer a level of detection and measurement that aren't feasible for humans. One of the latest efforts on this front is by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of California at Berkeley.