With the hopes of alleviating the strain on health services, Danish diagnostic company, Cerebriu, are scheduled to develop health tech to help identify which COVID-19 patients will need intensive care.
Cerebriu have received millions in funding from the Innovation Fund Denmark to develop health technology for identifying which COVID-19 patients will need intensive care. The innovative technology will help alleviate some of the strain put on national health services by the coronavirus pandemic, and could possibly help provide shorter waiting times in hospitals.
“We are very pleased and grateful for the support from the Innovation Fund Denmark. This situation is putting strain on the health services we are collaborating with on daily basis and no one knows how long this crisis will continue.” Says Robert Lauritzen, CEO and co-founder of Cerebriu.
Who will need intensive care, when will they need it and how long will they need it for?
COVID-19 is taking its toll and has forced most of society into lockdown. With hospitals and health professionals working hard to treat COVID-19 patients, one of their challenges is predicting how the disease will develop for each patient: who will need intensive care, when will they need it and how long will they need it for?
Health services will soon receive a helping hand in the form of new health technology which uses clinical data and scanning images of COVID-19 patients’ lungs to make a quick, qualified evaluation of which patients will require treatment in an intensive care unit.
Lauritzen adds: “Our experts in medical imaging will have it as their top priority to dramatically decrease rating time for radiologists, reducing burden on healthcare professionals and increasing overall quality of risk assessment.”
“The collaboration will be a tremendous help”
Earlier this month, Copenhagen University Hospital and Rigshospitalet, Denmark, received a grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation to fund a research project with the aim of helping to treat those affected by COVID-19. They then entered a deal with Cerebriu to create a technology that uses artificial intelligence to determine a COVID-19 patient’s risk of needing intensive care by assessing how severe they currently are, or how severe they will become.
This COVID-19 research deal is now expected to have a very good possibility of being a real help to health services, which is why the Innovation Fund Denmark has chosen to support Cerebriu in finishing development on the innovative product.
Rigshospitalet is excited at the prospect of using Cerebriu’s software as they treat COVID-19 patients, Martin Hylleholt Sillesen, staff specialist, Ph.D. at Center for Surgical, Translational and Artificial Intelligence Research (CSTAR) at Rigshospitalet says: “Fast and precise risk assessment is essential to both current and future COVID-19 patients. In that regard, it is important to be able to make a qualified analysis of all available health data in real time, including X-rays.
“Since Cerebriu has an established knowledge and technology capable of X-ray analysis, they are an important piece in the puzzle and we expect that the collaboration will be a tremendous help in our work with COVID-19 patients.”
Cerebrius’ software will initially be used at Rigshospitalet and the goal is to implement the technology at more of the nation’s hospitals.
The technology frees up necessary radiologist resources
With Cerebrius’ technology, Apollo, patient monitoring will improve, and it will be faster and easier to allocate resources, including respirators, in intensive care units. Moreover, the technology will unlock the resources of Danish radiologists, as it can perform clinical analysis of x-ray images and disease development instantaneously. This means that patient condition, disease development – and treatment needs – can be assessed much faster.
“Our initial focus on AI within diagnostic imaging combined with holistic improvement of workflows in hospitals is unique and it means that we are able to quickly support other areas in diagnostics than the brain area. It’s great to see how quickly our approach can be used to help with the sudden need to combat the coronavirus,” explains Lauritzen.
Apollo is a software solution that was initially developed to analyse MR-scans of patients with neurological symptoms. The computer software uses artificial intelligence to identify conditions such as bleeds, blood clots and tumours.
Learn more about Cerebriu here: We Are CEREBRIU
