{"id":118,"date":"2020-08-22T01:46:45","date_gmt":"2020-08-22T01:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/machine-learning.webcloning.com\/2020\/08\/22\/need-healthcare-ai-startup-curai-has-an-app-for-that\/"},"modified":"2020-08-22T01:46:45","modified_gmt":"2020-08-22T01:46:45","slug":"need-healthcare-ai-startup-curai-has-an-app-for-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/2020\/08\/22\/need-healthcare-ai-startup-curai-has-an-app-for-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Need Healthcare? AI Startup Curai Has an App for That"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

As a child, Neal Khosla became engrossed by the Oakland Athletics baseball team\u2019s \u201cMoneyball\u201d approach of using data analytics to uncover the value and potential of the sport\u2019s players. A few years ago, the young engineer began pursuing similar techniques to improve medical decision-making.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t long after Khosla met Xavier Amatriain, who was looking to apply his engineering skills to a higher mission, that the pair founded Curai<\/a>. The three-year-old startup, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is using AI to improve the entire process of providing healthcare.<\/p>\n

The scope of their challenge \u2014 transforming how medical care is accessed and delivered \u2014 is daunting. But even modest success could bring huge gains to people\u2019s well-being when one considers that more than half of the world\u2019s population has no access to essential health services, and nearly half of the 400,000 deaths a year attributed to incorrect diagnoses are considered preventable.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we think about a world where 8 billion people will need access to high-quality primary care, it\u2019s clear to us that our current system won\u2019t work,\u201d said Khosla, Curai\u2019s CEO. \u201cThe accessibility of Google is the level of accessibility we need.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curai\u2019s efforts to lower the barrier to entry for healthcare for billions of people center on applying GPU-powered AI to connect patients, providers and health coaches via a chat-based application. Behind the scenes, the app is designed to effectively connect all of the healthcare dots, from understanding symptoms to making diagnoses to determining treatments.<\/p>\n

\u201cHealthcare as it is now does not scale. There are not enough doctors in the world, and the situation is not going to get better,\u201d Khosla said. \u201cOur hypothesis is that we can not only scale, but also improve the quality of medicine by automating many parts of the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

COVID-19 Fans the Flames<\/b><\/h2>\n

The COVID-19 pandemic has only made Curai\u2019s mission more urgent. With healthcare in the spotlight, there is more momentum than ever to bring more efficiency, accessibility and scale to the industry.<\/p>\n

Curai\u2019s platform uses AI and machine learning to automate every part of the process. It\u2019s fronted by the company\u2019s chat-based application, which delivers whatever the user needs.<\/p>\n

Patients can use it to input information about their conditions, access their medical profiles, chat with providers 24\/7, and see where the process stands.<\/p>\n

For providers, it puts a next-generation electronic health record system at their fingertips, where they can access all relevant information about a patient\u2019s care. The app also supports providers by offering diagnostic and treatment suggestions based on Curai\u2019s ever improving algorithms.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur approach is to meticulously and carefully log and record data about what the practitioners are doing so we can train models that learn from them,\u201d said Amatriain, chief technology officer at Curai. \u201cWe make sure that everything we implement in our platform is designed to improve our \u2018learning loop\u2019 \u2013 our ability to generate training data that improves our algorithms over time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curai\u2019s main areas of AI focus have been natural language processing (for extracting data from medical conversations), medical reasoning (for providing diagnosis and treatment recommendations) and image processing and classification (largely for dermatology images uploaded by patients).<\/p>\n

Across all of these areas, Curai is tapping state-of-the-art techniques like using synthetic data in combination with natural data to train its deep neural networks.<\/p>\n

\"Curai<\/a>
Curai online assessment tool.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most of Curai\u2019s experimentation, and much of its model training, occurs on two custom Supermicro workstations each running two NVIDIA TITAN XP GPUs<\/a>. For its dermatology image classification, Curai initialized a 50-layer convolutional neural network<\/a> with 23,000 images. For its diagnostic models, the company trained a model on 400,000 simulated medical cases using a CNN. Finally, it trained a class of neural network known as a multilayer perceptron using electronic health records from nearly 80,000 patients.<\/p>\n

Curai has occasionally turned to a combination of the Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services to access larger compute capabilities, such as using a doubly fine-tuned BERT model<\/a> for working out medical question similarities. This used 363,000 text training examples from its own service, with training occurring on two NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ready to Scale<\/b><\/h2>\n

There\u2019s still much work to be done on the platform, but Amatriain believes Curai is ready to scale. The company is a premier member of NVIDIA Inception<\/a>, a program that enables companies working in AI and data science with fundamental tools, expertise and marketing support to help them get to market faster.<\/p>\n

Curai plans to finalize its go-to-market strategy over the coming months, and is currently focused on continued training of text- and image-based models, which are good fits for a chat setting. But Amatriain also made it clear that Curai has every intention of bringing sensors, wearable technology and other sources of data into its loop.<\/p>\n

In Curai\u2019s view, more data will yield a better solution, and a better solution is the best outcome for patients and providers alike.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn five years, we see ourselves serving millions of people around the world, and providing them with great-quality, affordable healthcare,\u201d said Amatriain. \u201cWe feel that we not only have the opportunity, but also the responsibility, to make this work.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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