Australian AI company revolutionising healthcare

Presagen, the Adelaide-based startup, has launched a new AI product for clinics at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas, aimed at revolutionising the way AI is applied to healthcare.

Presagen’s AI Open Projects in an online platform that connects clinics from around the world to safely crowdsource globally diverse datasets needed to build AI medical products that are robust, scalable and unbiased.

The financial value that is created from economies of scale can then be shared amongst contributing clinics via royalties. This enables clinics, particularly small and medium sized clinics, to benefit and unlock the value of their data with AI without wearing the technical or commercial cost and risk.

Participating in Presagen’s AI Open Projects is easy, regardless of clinic size or location. Clinics only need to provide data access, expertise and clinical support. Presagen does the rest, including AI build, regulatory approvals and commercialisation.

Presagen already has a call out for AI Open Projects in a range of healthcare sectors, including radiology, retinal, and fertility.

Presagen’s CEO Dr Michelle Perugini said “To build AI products that solve global problems, you need a global dataset which is diverse and represents different types of people and clinical settings. This is challenging because data privacy laws can prevent private medical data leaving the country of origin.  As a result, many focus on building AI from local datasets that are not diverse, creating AI that will be biased and simply will not scale.”

Presagen Co-Founder Dr Jonathan Hall said “Collectively a globally diverse dataset has the potential to create the world’s most powerful and globally scalable AI, and ultimately improve healthcare outcomes for patients around the globe.”

Presagen’s AI Open Projects was used to launch Life Whisperer, an AI application that helps clinicians identify which embryos will likely lead to a pregnancy for couples undergoing IVF treatment. Life Whisperer has shown to perform 25% better than clinicians’ current manual methods and has also demonstrated ability to non-invasively predict down-syndrome just by using images of embryos.

Presagen’s first AI Open Project in radiology will focus on the detection of lung cancer, in partnership with Dr John MacLean, a clinician with experience in radiology, surgical pathology, and general practice and founder of Doclink. Presagen expects to grow the list of projects to all areas of healthcare, with a vision of collectively becoming world-leaders in AI enhanced healthcare.

A core technology that facilitates AI Open Projects is Presagen’s patent-pending Decentralised AI Training technique. The technique allows AI to be trained on medical data distributed globally without having to move or centralise the data.

Rather than move private data to a central location, Presagen’s technique moves the AI to the data for training. Only the AI which is general knowledge derived from the data is shared and moved between data sources, and never the private data itself.

The technology was led by Dr Jonathan Hall and Co-Founder Dr Don Perugini. Dr Don Perugini has spent over 20 years in AI research and commercialisation. He started his career as a Defense scientist in Australia working in IoT and distributed AI systems, and worked collaboratively with international agencies including US Defense Research agency DARPA. Dr Hall is an AI specialist and has dual PhD’s in physics and nanotechnology.

Presagen Co-Founder Dr Don Perugini said “Presagen’s decentralised AI training technique overcomes significant issues around data sharing to create globally scalable AI. We believe this is a necessary paradigm shift and will revolutionise the way the healthcare industry will build AI products.”

Dr Michelle Perugini said “Building AI products requires a global collaborative effort and dataset. Together, we can grow value for patients with new levels of efficiency while delivering superior healthcare outcomes.”

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