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20th December 2021

The Med-Tech Oracle: An Israeli AI breakthrough is letting doctors flag high-risk patients before grave symptoms manifest

An AI program developed by the Tel Aviv University in collaboration with Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center uses existing data to note which patients were most liable to develop potentially life-threatening infections

With bloodstream infections being a potentially lethal outcome for many patients around the globe, the ability to calculate which patients would manifest symptoms and allocate resources appropriately would be a game-changer for both hospital administrations as well as medical specialists. This Israeli program seems to have cracked the code.

Sourasky Medical Center is the largest national medical care facility in Israel.

The program first studies the electronic medical data of its patients, including their medical history, before flagging which individuals were most likely to end up with a severe blood infection. In its first trial run analysing the records of approximately 8,000 patients at the Sourasky Medical Center, the program managed to automatically identify the risk factors with a success rate of 82% with the results of the study being published in the Scientific Reports journal.
Reporting on the experiment, Cell and Developmental Biology expert Professor Noam Shomron stated that they “worked with the medical records of about 8,000 patients with bloodstream infections between the years 2014 and 2020, during their hospitalization and up to 30 days afterward, regardless of whether the patient died or not.”
On any plans for the future, he elaborated that they “are now working with medical staff to understand how this information can be used to categorize patients based on the severity of their infection.”
This article was first published by i24NEWS.