Clinical diagnostics today is based on a costly process that focuses a large part of the responsibility on specialized medical personnel, diminishing the contribution of general practitioners, whose contribution is residual. General practitioners who, in times gone by when medicine was in a more backward phase, carried out a fundamental task, today are demoted and dedicated to performing mainly bureaucratic tasks.
It is as if medicine had flattened the role of the general practitioners, qualifying the role of specialist doctors for diagnostics and treatment. This led to a configuration of the health system that worked for decades, but represents a suboptimal drift that is not sustainable, especially in recessive economic periods, and in less wealthy countries.
Also, this configuration heavily crashed with the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to today's main problem represented by the scarcity of intensive care beds, we believe that what is urgently needed today in Italy, and all Europe, is a system capable of magnifying the abilities of each health operator, improving them with artificial intelligence. Such a system would allow enhancing both the ability to provide relevant answers, starting from the reliability of the diagnoses (especially in extensive screening processes during critical phases, such as the one we are experiencing now) and the efficiency and, therefore, the throughput of the patients analyzed.
Assumed that the screening process currently in place in Europe does not enhance the role of general practitioners, generates high costs for the community, and involves long waiting times, we believe it’s time for technology to change the scenario radically. That’s why we designed the NSH Platform to connect patients, general practitioners, and specialized doctors - starting from cardiologists and pulmonologists experts. Thanks to the Platform advanced, yet easy to use services, the diagnosis through imaging systems is much improved, allowing all stakeholders to increase the effectiveness and performance of the screening process, for the benefit of the community.
Covid19 diagnosis requires some steps after patients' hospitalization after they show some infection symptoms. One of the most resolutive diagnosis steps involves lung RX or CT to detect the nature and extension of damage. Moreover, there is a strong focus more on RX than CT due to the speed of patient tests and portability of devices, allowing to diagnose pneumonia even without moving people from their beds.
Moreover, lung radiography is also involved during patient recovery to understand therapy impact better and come out with a prognosis.
A trained deep learning model, able to detect lung damages (the so-called interstitial pneumonia), could support doctors from the very beginning and relief operative pressure.
Thanks to our doctors, we're also moving further considering ultrasound imaging and its involvement in the clinical diagnosis of COVID19 impact and how it impacts the heart and lungs. More on this soon after we start collecting the first set of data.
In the last few days we have released a more detailed description of this track project that could be used as a starting point to onboard hospitals or understand better what are the goals of the group in this area. You can find it here both in
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