Six digital health start-ups, specifically looking at AI to augment medical imaging, have recently been selected to become the first cohort of GE Healthcare and Nex Cubed’s Edison Accelerator program. Focusing on AI should improve patient care by changing the way healthcare is delivered in Canada, allowing clinicians to spend more direct time on patient care, and ultimately reduce burnout, according to GlobalData.
The leading data and analytics company forecasts that the market for AI platforms in healthcare will reach $4.3 billion, and healthcare providers will also be spending the most on AI platforms in 2024, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.6%.
Alexandra Murdoch, Medical Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “The medical industry tends to be slow when adapting to new technologies such as AI. Devices can be heavily regulated and extremely expensive. That being said, having a program such as Edison Accelerator could be useful to get more products on the market and used in everyday practice.”
The companies (16 Bit Inc, Bot Image, CardioWise, contextflow, corelinesoft and US2.ai) were chosen based on proposed solutions to current problems in healthcare*. The goal of the program is to accelerate, validate, and scale innovative solutions that address important challenges within the health sector.
Over the next few months, the companies will test their solutions within the Edison Digital Health Platform. The platform is vendor friendly, with the goal of developing and deploying AI tools that can be used in practice, within the clinical workflow.
Murdoch adds: “A program like the Edison Accelerator could help to improve healthcare in Canada. Currently, many Canadian provinces are experiencing a healthcare crisis, including staff shortages and long wait times. AI has the ability to automate many aspects of healthcare, thus improving wait times and increasing procedure numbers. The added help in imaging will also help patients get diagnoses quicker and could ultimately improve treatment plans.”
* The companies that were chosen to participate in the program are: 16 Bit Inc, a physician founded start-up that has created a computer-aided detection software that will function as a prescreening device for low bone mineral density; Bot Image, a medical device company that created a post-processing MRI device that uses AI to aid clinicians in image interpretation by providing prostate cancer diagnostics; CardioWise, an AI cardiac image analysis company that simplifies heart disease diagnoses; contextflow, which have developed deep learning-based tools to help radiologists complete their daily workload by providing analysis of lung disease patterns; corelinesoft, which specialize in AI development that provide medical image processing solutions; and US2.ai, a software start-up automating the flight against heart disease with AI-structured reports automatically processed in less than two minutes.
