Top Artificial Intelligence Companies in Healthcare to Keep an Eye On

The field of medical AI is buzzing. More and more companies set the purpose to disrupt healthcare with the help of artificial intelligence. Given how fast these companies come and go, it can prove to be hard to stay up-to-date with the most promising ones. Here, I collected the biggest names currently on the market ranging from start-ups to tech giants to keep an eye on in the future.

To further help you keep up with what A.I. brings to medicine, The Medical Futurist team made an easy-to-digest e-book about just that. I highly encourage you to read it and would love to hear about your thoughts!

Artificial Intelligence has to and will redesign healthcare

No one doubts that artificial intelligence has unimaginable potential. Within the next couple of years, it will revolutionize every area of our life, including medicine. Although many have their fears and doubts about AI taking over the world, Stephen Hawking even said that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. However, I am fully convinced if humanity prepares appropriately for the AI-age, artificial intelligence will prove to be the next successful area of cooperation between humans and machines.

Concerning healthcare, artificial intelligence will redesign it completely – and for the better. AI could help medical professionals in designing treatment plans and finding the best suited methods for every patient. It might assist repetitive, monotonous jobs, so physicians and nurses can concentrate on their actual jobs instead of e.g. fighting with the tread-wheel of bureaucracy.

In fact, our A.I. e-book guide aims to prepare healthcare and medical professionals for the era of human-machine collaboration, and would be a great way to know more about how such a collaboration can be beneficial to medicine.

Mining medical records is the most obvious application of AI in medicine. Collecting, storing, normalizing, tracing its lineage – it is the first step in revolutionizing existing healthcare systems.

Look at this example, AI is awfully needed!

Just look at this picture taken in a Hungarian hospital in the capital city, Budapest. The personnel manages patients’ appointments MANUALLY on a huge black board, and I do not even want to comment on the index-card holder. The whole scene is rather from an early 20th century hospital than a healthcare institution way in the second decade of the 21st century.

State of Affairs in a Hungarian Hospital - Photo Credit: Tamas Meszaros/Index

It is obvious that such systems are unsustainable, and artificial intelligence could offer help. And some entrepreneurs already realized the huge transformative as well as financial potential in medical AI. Researcher Frost & Sullivan said artificial intelligence systems will generate $6.7 billion in global revenue from healthcare by 2021, compared with $811 million in 2015. The market is truly booming, hence start-ups grow out of nowhere like mushrooms. So, let me introduce you to companies which are on the best way to democratize healthcare through artificial intelligence. It is truly worth keeping an eye on them, since they are great partners in building a more transparent and effective healthcare.

Mining Medical Records within Minutes

In the age of Big Data, it is no question how valuable patient data is. When such tech giants as Google or IBM appear in the field of patient data mining, everyone knows, it is something worth doing.

1) Google Health/DeepMind

Last September, DeepMind’s health team merged with Google Health so as to “build products that support care teams and improve patient outcomes.'' Google Health is tapping into A.I.’s potential to help in cancer diagnosis, predicting patient outcomes, averting blindness, and more.

These aren’t just empty words, Google has walked its talk. Together with company’s DeepMind branch, Google Health recently came up with an A.I.-based solution for identifying breast cancer. What’s more, the algorithm even outperformed all human radiologists it was pitted against, on average by 11.5%! While it was only on pre-selected data sets, studies doing the same on diverse clinical data are coming soon.

Source: https://www.neowin.net/

Also, Verily, the life sciences arm of Google’s umbrella corporation, Alphabet is working on its genetic data-collecting initiative, the Baseline Study. It aims to use some of the same algorithms that power Google’s famous search button in order to analyse what makes people healthy. This also includes experimenting with disease monitoring technologies, including a digital contact lens that could detect blood sugar levels.

2) IBM Watson Health

IBM’s dedicated health branch, Watson Health, was set up as a service to bring A.I.’s helping hand to stakeholders within the healthcare sector from payers and providers. With the power of cognitive computing, Watson Health has aided several renowned organizations like Mayo Clinic with its breast cancer clinical trial and Biorasi to bring drugs to the market faster while slashing costs by over 50%.

IBM even envisioned a tantalizing near-future scenario of health using its technology, which you can see in the video below:

However, while Watson Health develops a promising technology, they have also received some criticism. Reporters have questioned its diagnostic prowess while pointing out potential risks to patients’ safety. Stat News wrote about how Watson “often spit out erroneous cancer treatment advice and that company medical specialists and customers identified “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations''.

The Wall Street Journal reported on how "more than a dozen IBM partners and clients have halted or shrunk Watson’s oncology-related projects." As such, caution is advised even when working with solutions from big tech companies and IBM still seems to have more work to do before getting to its envisioned future of health.

3) Oncora Medical

The Philadelphia-based start-up aims to help cancer research and treatment, especially in radiation therapy. One of its co-founders, David Lindsay, was doing clinical work as an M.D./Ph.D student at the University of Pennsylvania, when he recognized that radiation oncologists had no integrated digital database that collected and organized electronic medical records. So he decided to build exactly that: a data analytics platform that can help doctors design sound radiation treatment plans for patients. 

Nowadays Oncora Medical boasts products targeted towards patient care and healthcare institutions. By collecting relevant data, the company’s software can measure quality of care, optimize treatment, as well as provide in-depth oncology outcomes data and imaging in order to help improve operations and patient outcomes.

With the automated solutions it provides, the company even quoted one user saying that “Oncora brought back the joy of being a physician.” This definitely aligns with what The Medical Futurist envisions as A.I. ushering the real era of The Art of Medicine.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/

4) CloudMedX Health

The start-up deep in the heart of the Silicon Valley focuses on optimizing patient and financial outcomes through predictive analytics. CloudMedX utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning to obtain existing data from electronic medical records and outputs clinical insights for health care professionals so as to improve patient outcomes. CloudMedx’s AI Assistant subsequently aid doctors and patients make data-driven decisions. 

The company’s solution has already been applied in several areas of medicine like congestive heart failure, liver cancer, ALS, renal failure, orthopedic surgery, with promising results. In fact, CloudMedx won the "Best Overall Connected Healthcare Solution" at the 2019 GITEX Award. I hope that many others will follow their lead in exempting medical professionals from administrative and data-related burdens.

5) Babylon Health

Based in the UK, Babylon Health has already rolled out its patient-centered remote consultation service to Rwanda and some British cities, with plans to launch in China, the USA and the Middle East in the pipeline. The free smartphone app’s dynamic A.I. will begin to ask users about their complaints and subsequently match them to a relevant physician, 24/7, via video or voice call for further medical assistance. Through deep learning, Babylon's A.I. system can also provide users with personalised insights to stay healthy and better understand their health.

Source: https://www.babylonhealth.com/

Babylon Health has seen a successful year in 2019. People used its app for a total of 2.2m A.I. consultations (that’s over 4 every minute, 24/7), while human doctors gave 1.2m consultations through its app (over 2 per minute).

6) Corti 

Corti is an A.I.-powered “co-pilot” for emergency medicine staffers. By listening in on patient interviews, analyzing the caller’s voice and background noises, and taking insights from historical data and artificial neural networks, the A.I. is able to understand the context and patterns in critical conversations. In this way, it can assist emergency medical professionals by alerting them if, say it identifies a heart attack in progress, and making life-saving decisions.

Dispatchers in Denmark, where the company is based, can identify a heart attack from descriptions over the phone about 73% of the time. On the other hand, a recent study with Corti showed that the A.I. performed better than emergency medical dispatchers for identifying cardiac arrest in emergency phone calls.

Disrupting Medical Imaging

Medical imaging encompasses every technique and method with which it becomes possible to represent the inner secrets of the body. X-ray, ECG, MRI, ultrasound, tomography – to name a few of the most commonly known ones. And what comes to your mind when you think about these procedures? Usually a huge, unfriendly room in a hospital with an even bigger, expensive-looking and complicated machine.

And if you think that, then you are awfully right. Also, two-thirds of the world lacks access to medical imaging exactly because current technologies are unwieldy, expensive, and require extensive training. This is exactly what the following, innovative AI-start-ups want to change.

1) Butterfly Network

Jonathan Rothberg established his start-up, Butterfly Network in 2011 with the goal to create a new handheld medical imaging device that can make both MRI and ultrasounds significantly cheaper and more efficient. His ultimate aim is to automate much of the medical imaging process.

The company’s Butterfly iQ is the first step towards this goal. This portable handheld device uses an Ultrasound-on-Chip technology to replace the traditional transducer system with a single silicon chip, emulating any type of transducer (linear, curved or phased) and allows for a whole body imaging from a single probe. By combining semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and cloud technology in a pocketable form, the Butterfly iQ is making remote medical imaging a reality, a boon to remote communities, some of which are benefiting from such crucial medical information for the first time.

2) Enlitic

Enlitic uses the power of deep learning technologies, specifically its prowess at certain forms of image recognition to harvest the data stemming from radiology images and applying it in unique medical cases. Deep learning actually means the process by which a computer takes in data and then, based on its extensive knowledge drawn from analyzing other data, interprets that information.

The start-up’s technology can interpret a medical image in milliseconds —up to 10,000 times faster than the average radiologist. It integrates seamlessly into any existing health system so as to optimize patient outcomes while empowering physicians. A study even showed that with Enlitic’s help, radiologists read cases 21% faster. In another study, the algorithm was even able to detect malignant lung nodules up to 18 months before a biopsy was even ordered.

3) Arterys

Where the cloud, artificial intelligence, and medical imaging meets, that is the point of work for Arterys. The pioneering start-up promises to “open medical imaging to the power of the cloud”.

Its FDA-cleared, deep learning A.I.-powered platform allows for faster radiology image examination, reduces missed detections by up to 70%, while automating mundane tasks and freeing physician’s time which they can invest in quality patient care. Moreover, being an always-connected, 24/7 solution, Arterys allows users to access important patient data anywhere in the world, at any time. The platform currently supports cardiac and pulmonary imaging analyses, with more coming soon.

4) Caption Health

Formerly known as Bay Labs, Caption Health is a company that develops A.I. software aimed at empowering medical professionals with access to and interpretation of high-quality medical imaging. Their product can in turn help improve patient outcomes and reduce cost.

In 2016, the company took its technology to Africa to help identify symptoms of Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) in Kenyan school children. The algorithm analyzed data derived from an ultrasound to take a good educated guess as to whether it’s seeing something consistent with RHD. During the trip, medical professionals scanned 1200 children in four days and were able to spot 48 children with RHD or congenital heart disease. Moreover, Caption Health said that the algorithm performed what usually takes a sonographer few years of training in a few minutes!

Bay Labs Kenyan Expedition. Source: https://jack-clark.net/

5) Behold.ai 

Using their red dot algorithm based on deep learning models, Behold.ai’s software is able to classify a CXR and localize its findings as heatmaps. Their A.I. was trained from over 30,000 images, all of which have been reviewed by experienced UK certified Consultant Radiologists. This resulted in an algorithm with over 90% accuracy that is able to detect abnormalities within seconds.

The company, headquartered in London, is already collaborating with the NHS and has deployed its A.I. solution in several NHS Trusts. Behold.ai has even achieved the gold standard of quality certification for ‘Instant Triage’ Solution. They now plan to introduce their services into the the US Healthcare system.

Speeding up biological and drug development from years to weeks 

Developing pharmaceuticals through clinical trials take sometimes more than a decade and costs billions of dollars. Speeding up the process of drug development and making it more cost-effective through AI technologies would have an enormous effect on today’s healthcare.

1) Atomwise

This San Francisco-based company aims to reduce the costs of medicine development by using supercomputers to predict from a database of molecular structures, in advance, which potential medicines will work, and which won’t. 

Their technology, called AtomNet, uses convolutional neural networks, an A.I. technology similar to the one in enables self-driving cars or that allows you to talk to your phone. By taking cues from millions of experimental affinity measurements and thousands of protein structures, AtomNet is able to predict the binding of small molecules to proteins and thereby identify an effective and safe drug candidate.

In 2015’s West African Ebola virus epidemic, Atomwise provided its artificial intelligence technology to perform the drug research in developing a treatment for Ebola virus infections while partnering with the University of Toronto and IBM. They found two drugs predicted by the company’s AI technology which could significantly reduce Ebola infectivity. This analysis, which typically would have taken months or years, was completed in less than one day! Imagine how efficient drug creation would become, if such clinical trials could be run at the “ground zero” level of health care, namely in pharmacies. I hope it will happen sooner than we think!

2) Recursion Pharmaceuticals

This drug discovery company was founded in 2013 with the purpose to build a proprietary drug discovery platform that combines the best elements of high-throughput biology and automation with the latest advances in A.I. To date, they’ve imaged more than 27 billion human cells and generated more than 4 petabytes of biological data to feed their A.I. 

By pairing computer vision with classic machine learning and neural networks, the company is able to conduct over 800,000 experiments every week. In this way, Recursion’s algorithm can reveal new drug candidates, mechanisms of action, and potential toxicity, that can lead to novel treatments for patients.

3) iCarbonX

Founded in 2015, the ambitious Chinese company iCarbonX wants to “digitize human life”. It basically wants to construct a “digital you” containing biological samples such as saliva, proteins, and DNA; bolstered by environmental measurements such as air quality; and lifestyle factors such as workout regimes and diet. 

By taking insights from data from new biological measures and people’s experiential data, iCarbonX is using its A.I. to search the data for new signals about health, disease and aging. From these insights, the company intends to offer a range of personalized products and services to help people reach their health targets.

4) Deep Genomics

Toronto-based Deep Genomics created an A.I. platform that works in concert with its experts to discover and develop genetic medicines, including novel therapeutic solutions for conditions with high unmet need. For instance, the company announced in September 2019 that it discovered novel treatment target and corresponding drug candidate for Wilson disease. Deep Genomics is also working on its Project Saturn which it describes as a “toolkit for controlling cell biology along crucial pathways”, which will allow for faster discovery of therapies.

Source: https://www.deepgenomics.com/

5) Turbine

Originating in Hungary, Turbine developed its proprietary Simulated Cell technology, a virtual high-definition tumour cell based on manually curated literature, that can be customized into a desired model. Millions of simulated experiments, guided by an A.I., can then be run on this model to analyze and better understand the underlying pathomechanism and design the best therapy.

The technology is already used in collaborations with Bayer, the University of Cambridge and top Hungarian research groups to find new cancer cures, speed up the time to market, and save the lives of patients suffering from currently incurable forms of the lethal disease.

Source: https://turbine.ai/

6) RDMD 

RDMD’s mission is to make patients’ medical information, especially when it comes to rare diseases, as accessible, accurate, and usable as possible for medical researchers, while giving patients control of their own data. All of these measures are made to allow patients to contribute to the research of treatments for rare diseases. By analyzing the data shared, RDMD’s research platform can generate crucial data insights that can aid to accelerate rare disease research and drug development.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/

If you know about other companies disrupting healthcare through artificial intelligence, please let us know!

Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD is The Medical Futurist and Director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a PhD in genomics, he is a keynote speaker and an Amazon Top 100 author.

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