Israel's Zebra-Med bring coronavirus diagnostics to India's Apollo
Zebra Medical Vision specializes in AI diagnostics tools, making triage of coronavirus patients faster and more efficient.
By DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDSHealthcare workers test a resident at a camp set up for the coronavirus disease outside a temple in Dharavi, one of Asia's largest slums, Mumbai, India, June 7, 2020.(photo credit: REUTERS/FRANCIS MASCARENHAS)
Israel's Zebra Medical Vision has partnered with the Indian Apollo Hospitals Group to roll out its software to help Apollo's doctors with diagnosis of COVID-19 efficiently and accurately, using Zebra's AI1 platform.Founded in 2014, Zebra-Med specializes in bringing revolutionary AI solutions to medical diagnostics and imaging, helping doctors to more accurately read the results of a range of traditional radiography and imaging scans.India has recorded more than 190,000 COVID-19 cases, resulting in more than 5,000 deaths to date. Zebra-Med's solution, which uses an AI algorithm to analyze CT scans, is designed to help medics triage cases more effectively, diagnosing the disease earlier and helping doctors decide which patients require hospital or ICU care as the disease progresses.“Zebra-Med software offers key insight into disease severity and enables doctors to diagnose and evaluate patients swiftly and effectively,” said Dr. Sreenivasa Raju K, CEO and Medical Director at Apollo Radiology International. “Deciding which suspected COVID-19 patients should be hospitalized is challenging when healthcare systems are overwhelmed. The vast majority of COVID-19 patients are mild, so having this automated tool has helped make critical decisions on whether to hospitalize.”The technology works by inputting data from millions of imaging scans, analyzing them for a number of different clinical findings. Through this process, the AI technology 'learns' to spot tell-tale signs of disease which human clinicians may overlook or misdiagnose. Zebra-Med's Textray chest x-ray research, for example, utilized nearly two million images identifying 40 common clinical findings.“Zebra-Med researchers and engineers used clinical data from a vast amount of medical images to train the AI model of the COVID-19 solution,” says Ohad Arazi, CEO of Zebra-Med. “Our partnership with Apollo Hospitals allows us to leverage a patented algorithm we had developed in the past for imaging features of COVID-19 pneumonia in order to help Apollo’s staff to track the progression of the disease.”Zebra-Med first partnered with Apollo in March 2019 to fight tuberculosis, a disease which disproportionately affects India. Some 2,690,000 people suffered from tuberculosis in India in 2018, according to the World Health Organization's Global Tuberculosis Report 2019, accounting for 27% of cases globally. Together, the companies focused on the development of an AI-based chest x-ray interpretation tool to more accurately diagnose and track the progress of the disease.
