Capital Health and MedyMatch explore potential of AI in stroke care

Capital Health and MedyMatch hope to speed up and improve the diagnosis of stroke victims in a joint venture utilising AI. Capital Health has agreed to provide the Israeli startup MedyMatch, with anonymised data from stroke patients to help further their research. MedyMatch, who specialise in medical imaging will use the data to improve its AI algorithms through deep learning to detect hundreds of related diseases. MedyMatch's artificial intelligence capability will provide a second set of eyes to physicians in the diagnostic stage, in which speed of diagnosis is critical. 

MedyMatch Technology, a startup from Israel that specializes in medical imaging analysis for emergency medicine, has its first U.S. hospital partner.

Capital Health, a two-hospital system in New Jersey, will deploy MedyMatch’s artificial intelligence-based analytics in the emergency department and help the Tel Aviv-based vendor develop a clinical decision support tool for stroke care. To accomplish the latter, Capital Health, based in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, has agreed to provide MedyMatch with anonymized data from patients, the organizations said Monday.

“The data Capital Health will provide will allow us to move closer to providing this decision support tool which can help ensure appropriate diagnosis, critical for treatment,” MedyMatch Chairman and CEO Gene Saragnese said in a prepared statement. Saragnese was CEO of Philips Imaging before joining the startup a year ago.

“Our partnership with Capital Health brings together breakthrough technology in deep learning and clinical expertise that will accelerate the transformation we all desire in healthcare, better care at lower cost,” Sarangase added.

Capital Health will provide the vendor with data from multiple medical imaging modalities, including CT, X-ray, MRI, ultrasound and PET. MedyMatch will lean on these records to build future applications and improve its AI algorithms, the company said.

“Having access to an archive of anonymized medical imaging data, and understanding the patient outcomes, represents an unprecedented opportunity for the MedyMatch artificial intelligence to self-learn, auto label and tag hundreds of diseases,” said MedyMatch Co-founder and COO Robert Mehler.

“MedyMatch is going to make clinical decision support in radiology faster and more accurate,” explained Dr. Ajay Choudhri, director of vascular and interventional radiology at Capital Health.

“MedyMatch’s artificial intelligence capability augments physicians’ reading ability and provides a second set of eyes on the patient’s imaging study,” Choudhri said. “In the area of stroke where time equals brain, it is critical to get a fast, spot-on diagnosis.”

While Capital Health represents the first U.S. deployment of MedyMatch systems, the company said several more partnerships are in the works. (Less than two months ago, MedCity News called the startup “little-known” and said it would be a “tremendous fit” as an acquisition target for IBM Watson Health.)

Photo: Bigstock