Although one in three women and one in five men will suffer a fracture due to bone loss in their lifetime, only 22 percent of eligible at-risk patients are screened for osteoporosis — the underlying disease causing those preventable fractures.
A Toronto-based startup called 16 Bit wants to reverse that trend. With two Mitacs interns from the University of Toronto’s Master of Science in Applied Computing on board, the company has launched Rho™, a disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) “radiology assistant” that uses routine x-ray images to accurately screen and identify patients at risk of osteoporosis.
16 Bit was founded by two radiologists, Dr. Mark Cicero and Dr. Alex Bilbily. Focused on revolutionizing healthcare using AI, the startup is driven by a mission of significantly enhancing the quality and accessibility of healthcare for all.
Mitacs has been helpful in providing support as 16 Bit plans to scale up. Graduate students Abdur Rahman and Sarthak Narayan are using their expertise to design and implement a cloud version of Rho™ that can easily scale as the company starts to market the technology as a Health Canada-approved software-as-a-medical device (SaMD). Rho™ has also received De Novo marketing authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care currently recommends risk assessment-first screening only for women 65 years and up and recommends against screening men aged 40 and up.
But Dr. Cicero believes age and sex alone are poor predictors of developing osteoporosis and is therefore trying to close this gap. Rho™ is trained to identify low bone mineral density from up to 80 percent of X-ray images when patients go for routine tests for other medical reasons.
This technology works in the background of a typical radiology information system to alert radiologists whenever suspected low bone density is detected in a patient.
“The idea is to raise a flag so the referring clinician can follow up with that patient, talk to them about osteoporosis risk factors and, when applicable, recommend further testing such as a DXA scan,” said Dr. Bilbily. He also pointed out that early intervention leads to fewer fractures and lowers healthcare spending over the long term.
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