Israeli startup that uses AI to declutter radiology reports raises $3M in new funding
An Israel-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to declutter radiology reports just raised $3 million in new funding, leaders announced Monday.
Agamon said London investment firm MMC Ventures is pitching in the largest share of capital, with additional contributions from Bayer, Seedcamp and InHealth Ventures. U.S. hospital systems such as Jefferson Health in Philadelphia and Henry Ford in Detroit currently deploy its technology, which uses natural language processing to simplify rad reports for easier interpretation.
Leaders said they’ll use this round of funding to target more hospitals clients and train its AI algorithms in other clinical domains.
“The inability of today’s computers to understand doctors' unique way of writing has been a major issue. Doctors can correctly describe an ‘infiltrating mass’ without writing the word ‘tumor’ or write ‘bilateral ground glass peripheral opacity’ without explicitly indicating a suspicion for COVID-19” Agamon CEO and Co-founder Michal Meiri said in a statement. “This language is effective for fast and efficient note-taking, which is critical, but makes tracking and managing treatments impossible for a computer.”
Meiri and a team of doctors, entrepreneurs and “intellectually curious technologists” first founded the Tel Aviv-based firm in 2018. In making its case, Agamon its website claims that 25% of radiologists in the U.S. are involved in at least one communication-related lawsuit, and upward of 96% of rad reports are not understood by the average adult.
In the announcement, Henry Ford Vice Chair of Radiology Danie Siegal, MD, said his system has looked to use AI to sort through its unstructured imaging reports more quickly.
“This helps us make sure no important clinical recommendation ever falls through the cracks and will assist with automating timely review of large report volumes,” he said in the Agamon statement.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.