Ibex Medical Analytics Deploys the First Ever AI-based Digital Pathology Cancer Diagnosis System in Live Clinical Setting, With Immediate Impact on Patient Care

The system aims to eliminate errors in diagnosing prostate cancer

Ibex Medical Analytics, a pioneering developer of AI-powered cancer diagnostics, recently announced that it has deployed the first ever AI-based digital pathology diagnostic system in a live clinical setting.

Ibex’s Second Read (SR) system was deployed in the pathology institute of Maccabi Healthcare Services, one of the largest healthcare providers in Israel and Ibex’s strategic partner. The lab is a centralized pathology institute that handles 160,000 histology accessions per year, of which approximately 700 are prostate core needle biopsies (PCNBs). The full-scale deployment is following a pilot period, in which the Ibex SR system identified isolated major errors in retrospective PCNBs that had been diagnosed as benign.

Shortly following deployment, the system identified a suspicious PCNB that had been reported as benign by a pathologist just hours earlier. It was subsequently re-examined and confirmed as low-grade prostate cancer (adenocarcinoma) which has clinical significance for patient management.

Ibex developed a computer software that identifies various cell types and features within whole slide images of PCNBs, including grading of cancerous glands and other clinically significant features. Ibex’s algorithm utilizes state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning techniques, and was trained on many thousands of image samples, taken from hundreds of PCNBs from multiple institutes. The digital images for this process are produced by the Philips Intellisite Pathology Solution that was installed in the Maccabi Pathology Institute last year.

“We are excited to be the first company to ever deploy an AI-based system in a clinically-active pathology lab, leveraging the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to make a real impact on human lives. It is extremely pleasing that our system has already positively affected a patient. We are now putting our full focus on making this system commercially available,” stated Joseph Mossel, CEO and Co-founder of Ibex Medical Analytics

“The complexity of prostate cancer diagnosis, together with the considerable shortage of pathologists, makes a second read system like this extremely useful for diagnostic accuracy and safety,” said Dr. Judith Sandbank, Head of the Maccabi pathology institute and Chief Medical Officer at Ibex Medical Analytics.

About Ibex Medical Analytics

Ibex Medical Analytics develops AI-driven clinical decision support tools that help pathologists deliver more efficient, metric-driven, objective and accurate diagnosis. It combines AI, data science, image analysis and machine learning technologies and applies them to cancer diagnostics in digital pathology, striving to improve patient outcomes and quality of life.

Source: Ibex