Enterprise Ireland funded project to research the use of AI to predict the best medical diagnostic test for a patient. 

xWave Technologies, an Irish healthtech startup headquartered at NovaUCD, and CeADAR, Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI, at University College Dublin, have announced the commencement of an innovation partnership project. 

Ricardo Simon Carbajo, head of innovation and development, CeADAR, Leo Clancy, CEO, Enterprise Ireland and Mitchell O’Gorman, CEO, xWave Technologies. Photo: Nick Bradshaw, Fotonic

Funded through the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Partnership Programme the project will research the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the best medical diagnostic test for a patient based on a range of input data.

Treatment pathways

Medical diagnostics, such as radiology and pathology, perform a vital role in the early identification of a disease in patients and determining the subsequent treatment pathways for the patient.

However, medical diagnostics is a field fraught with problems, including the timely and accurate diagnosis of patients to give them the best health outcomes possible. In radiology, for example, it is estimated that up to 50% of advanced radiology scans may be unnecessary and not of benefit to the patients that they are performed on.

This can result in long waiting lists and poor patient outcomes, including delayed diagnoses, missed diagnoses and unnecessary radiation exposure. It also costs health systems the substantial sums of money spent annually on unnecessary radiology scans. Central to these problems is the ability to ensure that the patient is referred for the best test for them at the right time.

xWave Technologies currently provides a clinical decision support platform to support clinicians in selecting the best test for their patients. Recent advancements in AI provide a significant opportunity to bring a data-driven approach to make medical diagnostic referring more predictive and personalised to the patient’s needs and is the focus of xWave’s project with CeADAR.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Mitchell O’Gorman, CEO, xWave Technologies, said: “It is estimated that 30% of the world’s data is being generated by healthcare alone. xWave and CeADAR have identified a way to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to unlock some of this data to ensure that patients are getting referred for the best test for them, not only taking into account their medical history but also their lifestyle, seasonal, geographic, demographic and social factors that can have a significant impact on health outcomes.

“This research will support the development of the next generation of clinical decision support systems, delivering hyper-personalised recommendations to achieve xWave’s mission of ensuring that patients get the best test first.”

Ricardo Simon Carbajo, head of innovation and development, CeADAR, said: “With approximately 80% of health data being available in unstructured format, text and video, the use of machine learning (AI) techniques to analyse and learn from healthcare data is becoming a necessity.

"This project will employ the latest research in natural language processing and understanding to extract, label and analyse healthcare data to provide greater personalisation and prediction for patients.

'Leverage CeADAR's expertise'

“Innovation partnership projects such as this project are designed to leverage CeADAR's expertise as Ireland's digital innovation hub in AI, to bring the latest technology to companies. We are very excited to partner with xWave Technologies to leverage this advanced technology with a view to improving patient outcomes.”

Leo Clancy, CEO, Enterprise Ireland said: “Irish innovators are playing transformative roles in shaping the future of healthcare, by using digital solutions to improve patient outcomes.

"This Enterprise Ireland-funded innovation partnership between xWave Technologies and CeADAR is an example of this ecosystem we are proud to foster, supporting high-potential startups and academia to collaborate on solving global problems through advanced technology, and I wish them every success.”

The innovation partnership project between xWave and CeADAR has been facilitated through UCD’s knowledge transfer team at NovaUCD.

The announcement coincides with the National Digital Health Innovation Conference, which is taking place today, organised by HSE Digital Transformation.