Chronic disease patients are facing serious risks both from keeping away from necessary care settings, as well as from potential COVID-19 infection. One in five chronic disease patients was already starting to avoid seeking care in physician’s offices and hospitals, according to a survey that started early last week of a panel of 1,300 chronic disease patients across several indications.

LONDON – Behold.ai Ltd. has secured U.S. FDA 510(k) approval for use of its Red Dot image recognition algorithm in the automatic diagnosis of life-threatening pneumothorax (collapsed lung). The product completes the analysis immediately, sending an alert to the radiologist as soon as an X-ray is taken. “It does in 30 seconds what would normally take up to 30 minutes,” said Simon Rasalingham, CEO of London-based Behold.ai.

Pharma has not gotten terribly serious yet about integrating digital health tools into clinical trials, let alone into their product offerings, despite the potential benefits they could offer when it comes to patient adherence, compliance and experience. Still, oncology giant Bristol Myers Squibb Co. has made a small step in that direction by partnering with Paris-based digital therapeutics company Voluntis SA.

TORONTO – Complain to your doctor about shortness of breath, chest pain or a rapid or irregular heartbeat and chances are you’ll end up on a treadmill to check for the presence of coronary artery disease or CAD. The conventional treadmill stress test is a time-consuming process that could change with patented, AI-driven sensor technology developed by Ottawa, Ontario-based Ausculsciences Inc. and bankrolled by US$10 million from investors anxious to see the CAD-det System approved for sale by the end of the year.

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and CMS both posted their final rules for electronic health records (EHRs), and analysts with Cowen Washington Research Group said both rules essentially replicate the draft versions. The provisions dealing with data blocking and interoperability are expected to benefit developers of HER systems in the near term, and telehealth should also benefit, albeit over a longer scale of time.

Swiss researchers set out to identify and analyze vital sign data that could offer a window into predicting circulatory failure, which could enable more effective prevention of catastrophic events in the ICU.

Pharma has not gotten terribly serious yet about integrating digital health tools into clinical trials, let alone into their product offerings, despite the potential benefits they could offer when it comes to patient adherence, compliance and experience. Still, oncology giant Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. has made a small step in that direction by partnering with Paris-based digital therapeutics company Voluntis SA.

LONDON – Ibex Medical Analytics is preparing for commercial rollout in Europe after receiving CE-IVD marking for its artificial intelligence (AI) decision support system for automated interpretation of prostate cancer biopsies. Galen Prostate, trained on more than 60,000 samples from multiple institutions, is intended to give a second opinion on digitized slides, following initial assessment by a pathologist.

AI-based, digital pathology startup Proscia Inc. has partnered with the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) to advance the practice of pathology via artificial intelligence (AI). The pair will start with prostate cancer and then plan to move on to validate approaches in several additional pathology subspecialties.

In an effort to gain new insights about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe, Boston-based Biofourmis Inc. is leveraging its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven remote monitoring platform to monitor Hong Kong patients diagnosed or suspected of having COVID-19. The remote monitoring and disease surveillance program, which kicked off just a few days ago, is being administered by the University of Hong Kong and includes Biofourmis’ Hong Kong-based joint venture, Harmony Medical Inc.