Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Health & Fitness
  3. News

Capitalizing upon AI technology, Sophia Genetics helps doctors diagnose illness

Lulu Chang
By

sophia genetics ai dna stock
If Dr. Gregory House were a real person, he might’ve finally met his match in the diagnostics field in the form of Sophia Genetics. The Swiss company employs artificial intelligence to help doctors and other medical professionals diagnose and treat patients by way of genomic analysis. And now, the firm has raised $30 million to continue on its life-saving quest.

Though just six years old, Sophia Genetics has already made quite a name for itself in the health world. Its technology is employed by more than 300 hospitals across 53 countries, and is said to have conducted analyses of more than 125,000 patient genomic profiles. Promising to be “the most advanced artificial intelligence AI for data-driven medicine,” Sophia Genetics takes the genomic profiles to improve upon diagnostic abilities across oncology, hereditary cancer, metabolic disorders, pediatrics, and cardiology.

Recommended Videos

“Since inception, our vision has been to develop innovative technological solutions to help patients equally, wherever they live,” Sophia Genetics CEO and cofounder Dr. Jurgi Camblong, told Venturebeat. “Sophia acts as a real disruptor by breaking down the information silos in health care, meaning that the information from a patient in London or Paris can, for instance, help better diagnose and treat a patient in Lagos or Rio.”

Related

But bridging those silos requires quite a bit of capital, and this latest cash injection should help the company continue refining its technology, and more importantly, increase hospital adoption of genomics testing. This is especially crucial to Sophia Genetics’ success because, like other AI technologies, its platform improves with further usage. That means that the more patient data the company can collect, the better its algorithms will be.

“Sophia Genetics is a company at the forefront of two rapidly changing technologies: genomic medicine and artificial intelligence,” Balderton Capital partner James Wise, one of Sophia Genetics’ newest investors, noted. “Giving every health care professional a standardized, straightforward, and fast way to analyze these complex data sets is an essential step to unlocking the potential of data-driven medicine. As diagnostic kits and sequencers become cheaper and more powerful, we believe that there is an opportunity to build the defining software layer on top of these technologies in genomics, just as Windows did for PCs and Android has for smartphones. And Sophia is already leading in this field.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Lulu Chang
Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Google’s AlphaGo Zero AI quickly masters ancient board game with no human help
alphago zero

Google shocked the world in 2016 when AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program created specifically to play the ancient board game Go, defeated one of the game’s top competitors in a five-game match. Such a feat wasn’t predicted to occur for at least another decade, leaving tech types and laymen alike wondering just how intelligent AI has become.

A little over one year later, AlphaGo again competed in a high-profile match, this time against the world’s top Go player, a 19-year-old prodigy named Ke Jie. The machine shut the human out, three games to none. With these victories under its belt, Google announced in May that it would retire AlphaGo.

Read more
AI being used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease early by reviewing brain scans
ai alzheimers italy diagnosis 42100086 l

A devastating chronic neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) currently affects around 5.5 million people in the United States alone. Causing progressive mental deterioration, it ultimately advances to impact basic bodily functions such as walking and swallowing.

Looking for a way to help, researchers at the University of Bari and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy have developed new machine learning AI technology that may help identify Alzheimer’s a decade before doctors usually can, by way of non-invasive MRI brain scans. An early diagnosis -- before any of the symptoms a doctor might recognize become apparent -- could give patients a chance to make changes to their lifestyle which may slow Alzheimer’s progression.

Read more
AI helps judges select top images for EyeEm contest from 590,000 entries
eyeem photography awards 2017 finalists masaki sato the great outdoors

How do you judge the world’s largest photography contest? With artificial intelligence, of course. On Thursday, EyeEm announced the top 100 finalists in its annual contest. The EyeEm Photography Awards brought in 590,000 submissions, making the event the largest of it’s kind this year.

Judges from National Geographic, the VII photo agency, Refinery29, and the BBC selected the top 20 images from each of the five categories. Those human judges were, however, assisted by EyeEm’s AI software. Inside EyeEm’s app, a feature called EyeEm Selects, uses AI software to recommend the best shots from the user’s camera roll. The company developed the feature by allowing a computer to “watch” actual photo editors sort through photos, marking which ones were good and which were bad. Along with helping out app users, the program also helped the judges sort through those 590,000 entries.

Read more