Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Art Papier, CEO of VisualDx (Part 2)

Art Papier: Our technology is not just about providing a library of images; it’s an intelligent search. You can see details like where the patient traveled, what kind of medication they are taking, their occupation, their symptoms, or their labs to develop the diagnostic possibilities.

We were tagging these images for several years. So when machine learning came along, we were able to use these tags to accelerate machine learning on the pictures.

We have an app for professionals called DermExpert. It allows a non-dermatologist like an emergency physician or a family physician to take a photo of a rash or lesion and get guided.

We also put that same technology with a more limited set for patients where they could get educated in their rash or lesion. This technology is called AYSA. It’s free in the App Store and Google Play.

Sramana Mitra: Could you talk more about the technology that is powering all of this? Is the categorization manual or automated? How about the application, training, and diagnosis?

Art Papier: We are in the category of clinical decision support on the professional side. There are different types of clinical decision support. You could have decision support that improves diagnosis like we do.

There are also testing decisions and treatment decisions. For example, the diagnostic clinical decision support category solves the problem in diagnosis in two different ways: recognition and analytical thinking.

I recommend reading a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. He explains that in system one, the human brain can recognize a pattern quickly. In system two, you need to think and use the frontal cortex.

Dr. Kahneman argues that humans by design prefer system one where we are intellectually lazy. We want to make snap decisions and recognize patterns. Most of the books have required us to read and only be analytical. We need VisualDx because the idea is the visualization of medical complexity.

That visualization will speed recognition. It’s easy to understand the concept. For example, birdwatchers identify the species of birds they are watching through books with image indexes. People have always relied on photos to help them pattern match what they are seeing in the field to the reference in the book.

The brain is good at this system one of pattern matching. Our technology is leveraging pattern matching but also assisting with the more complex analytical diagnosis skill.

On the pattern matching side and in the system, there’s this important concept called variation of disease. Not every diagnosis classically presents itself like how the medical student was taught in medical school in a textbook.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Art Papier, CEO of VisualDx
1 2 3 4