November 28, 2017 — Infervision is introducing what it calls the first and only artificial intelligence (AI) platform to help radiologists detect and diagnose stroke faster, leading to patients getting life-saving treatment when time is of the essence. This new stroke detection solution is being introduced at the 2017 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference, Nov. 26-Dec. 1 in Chicago.
The new Head CT (computed tomography) AI Augmented Screening technology assists doctors to determine which type of stroke a patient may have suffered, either a hemorrhagic (bleeding) stroke or an ischemic (blood clot) stroke, so that patients can receive effective and faster treatment. With a stroke, a patient suffers loss of brain tissue as the tissue dies without proper blood flow, leading to various types of impairment or even death, so a speedier diagnosis is essential to shorten the time before the proper treatment could begin.
To develop this diagnostic capability, the Infervision platform applied deep learning technology and trained many thousands of datasets of annotated medical images. Today, radiologists at Beijing Tian Tan Hospital are testing the Infervision platform to diagnose the type, location and severity of a patient’s stroke. For hemorrhagic stroke patients, the Head CT AI technology assists doctors in accurately and quickly determining whether a bleeding-type stroke has occurred, how much blood volume is involved (which is quite difficult and often inaccurately estimated through other methods), and the bleed location — crucial factors in deciding treatment options.
In ischemic strokes, today doctors typically use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans for diagnosis, especially in the early stages of the stroke, however this can often be a problem as MRIs are less available 24/7 and the MRI requires additional time for preparation and scanning. When treating strokes, the faster the treatment begins, the better the patient outcome may be. With the Infervision platform, doctors may take scans with the much more readily available CT machine, and use the AI technology to help guide them in making a faster diagnosis and perhaps save more brain tissue with faster and more appropriate treatment.
The Head CT AI Augmented Screening technology is the second medtech solution from Infervision. Last spring the company introduced a platform to aid radiologists in reading chest CT and X-ray scans to detect lung cancer and other cardiothoracic diseases. Known as AI-CT and AI-DR, the technology has been in use for more than a year at several top hospitals in China, a country with a huge demand for radiology diagnoses and a scarcity of radiologists. After rigorous testing and integrating the software with the standard picture archiving and communication system (PACS), Infervision’s technology is proving to be extremely effective, according to the company. It improves the efficiency of radiologists, by reducing the time to read each CT and X-ray scan, and enabling the doctors to bring their attention to malignant lesions or nodules.
For more information: www.infervision.com