Artificial intelligence is continuing to make its mark in the healthcare field.
Tel Aviv, Israel-based MedyMatch Technology and Danvers, Massachusetts-based Samsung NeuroLogica have joined forces to use artificial intelligence to assist patients in prehospital environments.
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MedyMatch is an artificial intelligence company. “Our business is based on machine learning,” MedyMatch CEO Gene Saragnese said in a phone interview with MedCity.
Samsung NeuroLogica is the healthcare subsidiary of Samsung Electronics. “NeuroLogica has been in the CT business for many years,” Saragnese said.
The alliance, which brings together MedyMatch’s AI clinical decision support tools and Samsung NeuroLogica’s medical imaging hardware, was a smart move for the companies, according to Saragnese. “There’s a strong overlap between the two companies,” he said.
Initially, the companies plan to focus on assessing stroke patients. MedyMatch’s AI technologies will be integrated into mobile stroke units and other emergency vehicles that have a portable Samsung NeuroLogica CereTom CT scanner. Through this, the care team will more easily be able to assess whether the patient’s stroke is due to a hemorrhage or a blood clot.
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Many of the nearly 800,000 Americans who experience a stroke each year have an ischemic stroke, which can be treated with a tissue plasminogen activator. The tPA must be administered to the patient within three hours of initial signs of stroke, but “it can take an hour after a stroke patient arrives in the emergency department to receive treatment because of the time needed to determine which kind of stroke the patient is having,” the companies point out in a release. By collaborating, MedyMatch and Samsung NeuroLogica are hoping to quicken the treatment process for stroke patients en route to the hospital.
“In stroke care, time is absolutely critical,” Saragnese said. “We want to improve the confidence physicians have in making these decisions.”
But MedyMatch’s goal goes farther than that. Saragnese told MedCity that MedyMatch strives to improve clinical outcomes and ultimately save money. “What we want to do is improve the quality of diagnosis and speed of treatment, and more people will recover from stroke,” he said. “There will also be fewer people in long-term care, and then there will be cost savings.”
MedyMatch launched in February 2016. Though it’s a startup, the company has already begun to make its mark in the healthcare field. Last June, it partnered with Capital Health in New Jersey. Capital Health vowed to help MedyMatch develop a clinical decision support tool for stroke care.
Photo: John Lund, Getty Images
