Dark Daily: FDA Grants Marketing Authorization to First Ever AI-Powered SaMD Diagnostic Tool for Sepsis That Shares Patient’s Risk within 24 Hours and Works with EHRs

From the Dark Daily: Infection control teams and clinical laboratory managers may want to look at this new product designed to improve the diagnosis and treatment of sepsis

Accurate and fast diagnosis of sepsis for patients arriving in emergency departments is the goal of a new product that was just cleared by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is also the newest example of how artificial intelligence (AI) continues to find its way into pathology and clinical laboratory medicine.

Sepsis is one of the deadliest killers in US hospitals. That is why there is interest in the recent action by the FDA to grant marketing authorization for an AI-powered sepsis detection software through the agency’s De Novo Classification Request. The DNCR “provides a marketing pathway to classify novel medical devices for which general controls alone, or general and special controls, provide reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness for the intended use, but for which there is no legally marketed predicate device,” the FDA’s website states.

Developed by Chicago-based Prenosis, the Sepsis ImmunoScore is an AI and machine learning (ML) Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) used to “guide rapid diagnosis and prediction of sepsis” within 24 hours of the patient’s presentation in an emergency department or hospital, according to a company news release.

In a separate statement, Prenosis announced a commercial distribution deal with Roche, Basel, Switzerland, as well as the SaMD’s availability on Roche’s navify Algorithm Suite (a digital library of medical algorithms).

Unlike a single analyte assay that is run in a clinical laboratory, Prenosis’ AI/ML software uses 22 diagnostic and predictive parameters, along with ML algorithms, to analyze data and produce a clinically actionable answer on sepsis.

It is important for clinical laboratory managers and pathologists to recognize that this diagnostic approach to sepsis brings together a number of data points commonly found in a patient’s electronic health record (EHR), some of which the lab generated and others the lab did not generate.

How it Works

To assist doctors diagnose sepsis, the ImmunoScore software is first integrated into the patient’s hospital EHR. From there, it leverages 22 parameters including:

• Respiratory rate,
• Blood pressure, and
• White blood cell count to produce a score that informs caregivers of the patient’s risk for sepsis within 24 hours, MedTech Dive reported.

Instead of requiring a doctor or nurse to look at each parameter separately, the SaMD tool uses AI “to evaluate all those markers at once”, CNBC noted. It then produces a risk score and four discrete risk stratification categories (low, medium, high, and very high) which correlate to “a patient’s risk of deterioration” represented by:

• Hospital length of stay.
• In-hospital mortality.
• Intensive care unit transfer within 24 hours.
• Vasopressor use within 24 hours.
• Need for mechanical ventilation within 24 hours.

By sharing these details—a number from one to 100 for each of the 22 diagnostic and predictive parameters—Sepsis ImmunoScore helps doctors determine which will likely contribute most to the patient’s risk for developing sepsis, MedTech Dive reported.

“A lot of clinicians don’t trust AI products for multiple reasons. We are trying very hard to counter that skepticism by making a tool that was validated by the FDA first, and then the second piece is we’re not trying to replace the clinician,” Bobby Reddy Jr., PhD, Prenosis co-founder and CEO, told MedTech Dive.

Big Biobank and Blood Sample Data

Prenosis, which says its goal is the “enabling [of] precision medicine in acute care” developed Sepsis ImmunoScore using the company’s own biobank and a dataset of more than 100,000 blood samples from more than 25,000 patients.

AI algorithms drew on this biological/clinical dataset—the largest in the world for acute care patients suspected of having serious infections, according to Prenosis—to “elucidate patterns in rapid immune response.”

Carle Foundation Hospital, Urbana, Ill., is one of three Illinois hospitals that helped build the biobank and dataset used by Prenosis, according to a Carle news release.

“It does not work without data, and the data started at Carle,” said critical care specialist Karen White, MD, PhD, Carle Foundation Hospital, St. Louis, MO, in the news release.  “The project involved a large number of physicians, research staff, and internal medicine residents at Carle who helped recruit patients, collect data, and samples,” she said.

Opportunity for Clinical Laboratories

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition based on an “extreme response to an infection” that affects nearly 1.7 million adults in the US each year and is responsible for 350,000 deaths, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.

A non-invasive diagnostic tool like Sepsis ImmunoScore will be a boon to emergency physicians and the patients they treat. Now that the FDA has authorized the SaMD diagnostic tool to go to market, it may not be long before physicians can use the information it produces to save lives.

Clinical laboratory managers inspired by the development of Sepsis ImmunoScore may want to look for similar ways they can take certain lab test results and combine them with other data in an EHR to create intelligence that physicians can use to better treat their patients. The way forward in laboratory medicine will be combining lab test results with other relevant sets of data to create clinically actionable intelligence for physicians, patients, and payers.

—Donna Marie Pocius

SOURCE: Dark Daily