Artificial intelligence (AI) health care startup Viz.ai has raised $21 million in a round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV. Founded out of San Francisco in 2016, Viz.ai is setting out to leverage AI to detect early signs of time-sensitive medical conditions. The company’s first product is a software platform that analyzes brain scans for large vessel occlusions (LVOs), or strokes, and which received FDA clearance in February.

The potential benefits are great. As Tom Devlin, a stroke neurologist at Erlanger, observes, “We know we lose 2m brain cells every minute the clot is there.” Yet the two therapies that can transform outcomes—clot-busting drugs and an operation called a thrombectomy—are rarely used because, by the time a stroke is diagnosed and a surgical team assembled, too much of a patient’s brain has died. Viz.ai’s technology should improve outcomes by identifying urgent cases, alerting on-call specialists and sending them the scans directly.

The technology from Viz.ai (the ai is for artificial intelligence) recently gained Food and Drug Administration approval. The company and Erlanger are talking to other Chattanooga hospitals about installing its diagnostic software there, which would allow neurologists to see brain scans almost simultaneously.

A Viz.ai study of 300 patients, which prompted the FDA approval, showed that the company’s software was able to notify a stroke neurologist on average 7.3 minutes after the brain imaging took place—compared with the hours that it sometimes takes with conventional diagnostic procedures. The technology accurately identified severe strokes as precisely as expert stroke radiologists do, the study found.

The system holds promise for improved outcomes, medical experts say, but only if it can be widely adopted by hospitals. One concern is cost. Companies developing the technology haven’t set a price but say it won’t be cost-prohibitive.

הם פועלים בתחומי הסייבר, האינטרנט של הדברים והמסחר האלקטרוני, וגם בבריאות ובחקלאות - וכולם רוצים לשנות את העולם עם רעיון חדשני והרבה התלהבות. מגזין אלה הסטארטאפים הישראליים שייעצבו את העתיד. לאיזה מהם הפוטנציאל הגדול ביותר? סמנו את הבחירה שלכם

According to the CDC, stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in the US, killing about 140,000 people each year. More than 795,000 people in the US have a stroke each year, adding up to an estimated $34 billion in health care services, medicines to treat stroke and missed days of work. Detecting signs of a potential stroke early can be critically important to preventing long term disability or death. Patients who arrive at the emergency room within three hours of their first symptoms often have less disability than those who received delayed care.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly on the rise in healthcare. From fledging medtech companies to established giants like Watson IBM—many firms are riding the current AI wave. Not only are companies embracing technology, but so is FDA.

The FDA announced yesterday that it will permit marketing of Viz.ai’s Contact, a clinical decision support (CDS) tool that analyzes CT results and highlights cases that may have experienced a stroke.

Viz.AI Contact software that provides artificial intelligence-assisted stroke detection for CT scans and automatically notifies neurovascular specialists by text message got U.S. marketing approval from the FDA, the agency announced.

Erlanger Health System, a multi-hospital health system based in Tennessee have announced a partnership with Viz.ai., a leading applied artificial intelligence company, to transform stroke care. The Erlanger Stroke Center is one of the foremost stroke centers in the nation.

Viz.ai, an applied artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare company focused on time sensitive conditions, has secured $21 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from GV, formerly Google Ventures. Founded in 2016 by Dr. Chris Mansi and Dr. David Golan, Viz.ai has built the first FDA cleared computer aided triage software to detect and triage urgent stroke cases. The AI cloud-based platform analyzes brain scans for large vessel occlusions (LVOs) and sends the scan to a neurovascular specialist to facilitate early therapeutic intervention.

Viz.ai, Inc., an applied artificial intelligence healthcare company, announced today that new data on its approved and investigational technologies for acute ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke will be presented during the 4th European Stroke Organization Conference (ESOC) from May 16-18 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Viz.ai, Inc., an applied artificial intelligence healthcare company, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared Viz CTP through the 510(k) pathway. Viz CTP offers image processing software to view and analyze functional and dynamic CT perfusion images. This clearance offers healthcare providers another important tool for automated cerebral-image analysis.

Viz.ai has ensured that its business structure and processes conform to ISO standards and, following audit, has received the following ISO Certifications: ISO/IEC 27001:2013, ISO 27017:2015, ISO 27018:2014, ISO 27799:2016 and ISO 22301:2012.

Viz.ai Inc. solutions and deployments based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) were reviewed (audited) by AWS, and found to match the highest requirements for security, reliability, performance efficiency, operational excellence and cost optimization set by the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The cover letter of the audit report, provided to Viz.ai by AWS reads:

... The Well-Architected review has been insightful on our part, and we hope you will find it useful as well. I’ve personally found your workload impressive and outstanding, both from the technological point of view, and because of the high standards ...

... Overall, your system is impressive and Well-Architected in many aspects. As a matter of fact, you are Well-Architected right now already ...

Viz.ai, Inc., an applied artificial intelligence healthcare company announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a De Novo request for the first-ever Computer-Aided Triage and Notification Platform to identify Large Vessel Occlusion (LVO) strokes in CTA imaging. This regulatory clearance compliments Viz.ai's recent European CE Mark for the product in January 2018.

Viz.ai, a revolutionary Direct-to-Intervention healthcare company, today announced that Conrad Yiu has been named as its Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). As CCO, Yiu has responsibility for all customer-facing activities, including global sales, marketing, product development, clinical research, business development, and customer support. Yiu will report directly to Chris Mansi, M.D., Viz.ai’s President and CEO.