AI LUMBAR SPINE

MRI READING AND REPORTING

CoLumbo reads, segments, measures and classifies MRI images to provide pathology description, findings and measurements with pre-populated structured or free text report. The project has European Commission Seal of Excellence and there is USPTO Patent Pending US 63/239,985.

CoLumbo has CE mark and is cleared for clinical use in Europe.

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BENEFITS OF COLUMBO

SAVE TIME

CoLumbo can help radiologists to reduce the patient examination time by up to 25%. This facilitates an increase in total patients examined and a reduction of the cost per patient eximation when radiologist hourly rate is taken into account.

INCREASE ACCURACY

Clinical trials has concluded that CoLumbo can reduce erros of omission up to 15% as this percentage is higher for less experienced radiologists. Radiologist using CoLumbo is more accurate than a radiologist NOT using CoLumbo

STANDARDISATION

CoLumbo brings standardization in reporting practices in the case of multiple hospital chains or medical imaging centers. The fully customizable pathology treshold levels enable setting measurement standardisation.

CoLumbo is software for analysis of Lumbar spine images obtained with MRI.

CoLumbo was ranked No.1 overall and in every single category – Dice, ASD and Localization distance at the IVDM3Seg-Segmentation Challenge organized by MICCAI.

CoLumbo is software for analysis of lumbar spine images obtained with MRI. The purpose of CoLumbo is to assist with the reading of MRI images on the lumbar spine and to provide information on detected pathologies and abnormalities, and reduce the time to record the readings. According to the Spine Reporting Survey we conducted, the radiologists think that on average about 17.2 minutes are needed for thorough L-Spine MRI diagnostics in cases without any complications and about 30 minutes for more complex cases, but they have only 13.6 minutes on average for MRI reading in a real clinical situation at the cost of up to 30% errors and omissions.

The key novelty of CoLumbo lies in the unique machine learning algorithm, based on fully convolutional neural networks combined with medical domain knowledge, dropout regularization, and packet normalization which are capable of reading MRI images, to provide a complete diagnosis. U-Net-like architecture is used to improve the resolution.

The first step is the Segmentation of specific structures which is made on a pixel level and the use of fully convolutional neural networks allows quick segmentation maps to be generated for images of any size. The second is the identification of key points in the MRI images. After this is the measurement of distances, areas and angles. Finally, the combination of segmentation, measurements, and specially applied algorithms provides the diagnosis according to the parameters described in the scientific medical literature. All findings are presented in a easy-to-use final draft report, which is currently available in three languages – English, German and French. More languages will be added soon.

The main benefits of CoLumbo are lower cost, ease of use and optimal cost-result ratio. CoLumbo holds the potential to alleviate the economic burden imposed on the business as the low cost of the service will render it available to a bigger part of the population, thus helping with the implementation of preventative measures which will lower the number of chronically disabled employees.

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FEATURES OF COLUMBO

PATHOLOGIES AND OTHER FINDINGS:

HERNIATION AND ITS SIZE, LOCATION AND POSSIBLE ASCENDING AND/OR ASCENDING MIGRATION
NERVE ROOT IMPINGEMENT
DURAL SAC COMPRESSION
CENTRAL STENOSIS
ANTERO AND RETRO – SPONDYLOLISTHESIS
SYMMETRICAL AND ASYMMETRICAL BULGING
HYPO AND HYPER-LORDOSIS
REDUCED DISK HEIGHT
REDUCED VERTEBRAL BODY HEIGHT
INCREASED AORTIC DIAMETER
AXIAL FORAMINAL SIZE
LEVEL LABELS

TISSUE BOUNDARIES:

VERTEBRAL BODY
OTHER PARTS OF THE VERTEBRA
DISC
HERNIATED PART OF THE DISK
DURAL SAC
NERVE ROOTS
LIGAMENTUM FLAVUM
AORTA

MEASUREMENTS PERFORMED:

SIZE OF HERNIATION
HERNIATION CIRCUMFERENCE
HERNIATION LOCATION SCORE
MIGRATION SIZE
NERVE ROOT IMPINGEMENT SCORE
DURAL SAC AREA AND STENOTIC RATIO
SPINAL CANAL DIAMETER
LISTHESIS PERCENTAGE AND GRADE
L1S1, L1L5 AND L1L4 LORDOTIC ANGLES
AORTIC DIAMETER
BULGING SIZE
BULGING CIRCUMFERENCE
BULGING SYMMETRY SCORE
DISC HEIGHT (ANTERIOR, MIDDLE, POSTERIOR) AND RATIOS
VERTEBRAL BODY HEIGHT (ANTERIOR, MIDDLE, POSTERIOR)
AXIAL FORAMINAL SIZE
INTERVERTEBRAL ANGLES

WHO CAN BENEFIT FROM COLUMBO

RESIDENT OR GENERALIST RADIOLOGISTS

Less experienced radiologists like residents and generalists will benefit the most from our software. The greates benefit for this user group is the inrease in accuracy due to the reduced errors of omission when using CoLumbo.

RADIOLOGISTS USING MEASUREMENTS

The biggest time saving from using CoLumbo is attributed to the pre-populated draft report, which includes measurements of all pathologies detected by the software. In addition, related tissues measurements, such as vertebral body and disk heights, are visualised in the user interface.

HOSPITALS AND IMAGING CENTER CHAINS

An unique feature of CoLumbo is the complete customisation of pathology treshold levels. When multiple hospitals or imaging centers use the same treshold levels standardisation in reporting can be achieved.

SOCIAL IMPACT

Low Back Pain has a major economic impact with total costs related to this condition exceeding 100 Billion USD per year only in the United States. Herniated discs, stenosis and spondylolisthesis are major causes for lower back pain and disability and the latter being a significant socio-economic problem all over the world. Annually there are 10 million MRI spine exams in the US alone with radiologist wages of USD 140 per hour and second opinion price of USD 50 per exam.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

Population in developed countries is aging and there is an enormous demand for healthcare specialists that leads to the demand for healthcare products that will facilitate the work of the physicians. Trends indicate that in five years half of them will be medical and 50 to 80% will be analyzed by artificial intelligence or deep learning software.

THE SOLUTION

Currently, there are situations when patients may need to wait a very long time for diagnosis and pay a very high price. CoLumbo aims in offering a reliable and accurate diagnosis of back pain problems for a fraction of the current costs. Furthermore, the platform offers a completely unbiased diagnosis with no ulterior motives. A blind study indicates up to 30% disagreement between radiologists. With CoLumbo the errors will be reduced by up to 15% and time savings of at least 25% will occur.