Oxipit has nabbed European approval for ChestLink, the first AI application designed to conduct diagnostic evaluations of chest X-rays alone without help from radiologists.

The company scored the CE Mark for its solution, which it says will help alleviate radiologist shortages by automating between 15% to 40% of daily reporting workflows, depending on the type of medical institution. It can now be deployed in 32 European countries.

When highly confident that X-ray scans show no abnormalities, ChestLink produces final reports for healthy patients. Oxipit says that these X-rays would appear normal to trained professionals and that by automating the work for them, ChestLink gives them more time to focus on patients and complete other important tasks. It takes into account aspects of patient age, clinical context and varying radiologist subjectivity.

Fully autonomous ChestLink operations in a clinical setting are expected to start in early 2023, according to company CEO Gediminas Peksys. “The sensitivity metric of 99% has translated to zero clinically relevant errors at our deployment institutions during the application piloting stage.”

The solution is based on Oxipit ChestEye, an earlier platform developed by the company for preliminary chest X-ray reports. Oxipit ChestEye can identify 75 radiological findings, which makes up approximately 90% of the abnormalities that radiologists encounter daily.

Before being certified, ChestLink was evaluated in a supervised reporting setting in multiple pilot locations for a year. It processed more than 500,000 real-world chest X-ray images. For operational oversight the application produces an analytics page with real-time updates and daily summaries on what cases were autonomously reported.

Prior to any autonomous operations, the solution will conduct a retrospective imaging audit to help identify what parts of studies at a medical practice can be successfully automated. Oxipit medical staff and radiologists at the institution will then validate the reports. Following this, the application will be used to autonomously make reports.

The company previewed the solution in March 2021 at ECR. "Initially this would be most helpful for primary care and diagnostics centers, where up to 80% of all chest X-rays feature no abnormalities. Furthermore, a similar autonomy framework can be adapted for large scale screening projects, such as the global tuberculosis effort,” said Peksys at the time.

Oxipit is based in Lithuania.

The company did not respond to HCB News' request for comment.

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