Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cancer diagnostics startup Ibex Medical Analytics has earned the CE mark for its Galen Gastric solution, which supports pathologists in the detection of various types of gastric cancer, the company announced Wednesday.
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Gastric cancer is a prominent malignant disease in both men and women worldwide, with over a million new cases every year and a relatively poor prognosis.
Galen Gastric was developed by a team of pathologists, data scientists and software engineers who implemented advanced Deep Learning technologies and trained algorithms on more than a million image samples, scanned from biopsy slides digitized using digital pathology.
The CE mark follows results from a blinded, multi-site clinical study at Medipath, the largest pathology network in France, and at Maccabi Healthcare Services, the second-largest healthcare network in Israel. Galen Gastric demonstrated very high accuracy in detecting various types of gastric cancer, as well as Helicobacter pylori (a common gastric bacterial infection and a precursor for cancer), neuroendocrine lesions, dysplasia, adenoma and additional pathologies.
"Diagnosis of gastric biopsies remains a challenging task for pathologists. Gastric cancers are relatively scarce, often minute and sometimes easy to miss," said Dr. Judith Sandbank, Director of the Pathology Institute at Maccabi Healthcare Services, and the principal investigator in the study. "We were impressed with the successful outcomes and the very high accuracy demonstrated by Galen Gastric in detection of different cancer types. It's also encouraging to see an AI solution that goes beyond cancer detection to accurately identify H. pylori, and provide additional insights on dysplasia, lymphoma, gastritis and other pathologies."
Sandbank said that Maccabi was already using Galen Gastic and it had improved the quality of the HMO's cancer diagnosis and patient care.
