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Supporting pathologists in cancer diagnostics
The €2.1M funding was awarded to Aiforia Technologies as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and enables the health tech company to launch itself into the diagnostics space. Aiforia’s vision is that AI will become a mandatory tool for doctors, soon a visual diagnosis will not be made without the assistance of AI.
Growing cancer incidence and sample numbers are creating unmanageable workloads for doctors, especially pathologists. This, coupled with slow, manual, and inefficient tools which can produce variability and inconsistencies in diagnosis, creates a significant burden to healthcare systems globally. The burden also falls on the patients as they have to wait for months for a diagnosis. Treatments are delayed. Outcomes are worsened.
Aiforia provides a solution to automate the analysis of digitized tissue samples in a rapid and consistent manner. Diagnosis can be produced in minutes instead of hours. Pathologist’s workflows and decision-making are streamlined, even from remote locations, with the assistance of the cloud-based platform. Aiforia now kicks off its cancer diagnostics endeavour with this new funding.
The company is building the first pre-developed deep learning AI models for clinical use to help diagnose some of the most common cancer types in the world, including for example prostate and lung cancer. Aiforia’s objective is to significantly enhance the quality of cancer diagnostics and thus improve treatment outcomes.
“There is a growing global need to improve the efficiency and accuracy of pathology sample analysis. Aiforia® disrupts the current methodology, well over a century’s old visual microscopy, by bringing AI to the hands of doctors. This completely revolutionizes pathology,” explains Aiforia CEO Kaisa Helminen.