Finnish artificial intelligence specializes in oncology and neuroscience

Helsinki.
“Land of a Thousand Lakes” – Almost everyone in Europe associates Finland with this synonym, which, according to the official tourism office, actually includes nearly 190,000 lakes from Helsinki to Lake Inari in Lapland.

With fewer than 5.5 million residents, Finland is also home to a thriving start-up economy with more than a thousand ideas from the field of artificial intelligence (AI) – which is not surprising given the fact that not only do Scandinavia use saunas, but SMS, Linux, and Nokia have also invented them. She has significant patents for 5G technology.

Finland has the largest number of digital startups per capita in the world – more than 400 of them are in artificial intelligence. Many of them have the potential to shape the healthcare landscape of the future, as was demonstrated recently in a press event in the virtual format of the “Business Finland” foreign trade platform.

Pattern recognition to save time

Images of tissue samples are the cornerstone of cancer diagnosis. Pathologists sometimes have to spend a lot of time evaluating the corresponding result. This is where AI can help, as it has already, among other things Radiologists at Essen University Hospital have shown that they consistently rely on machine learning (ML) technology within artificial intelligence for pattern recognition..

Helsinki startup Aiforia targets pathologists and scientists in preclinical, academic and clinical laboratories with a cloud-based AI pattern recognition solution to enhance the speed, accuracy and consistency of analyzing large and complex medical images, for example in oncology.

According to the company, Aiforia’s AI neural networks can be trained to recognize and analyze every feature in every image. To date, more than 1000 AI models have been created with Aiforia.

Since young pathologists, like other specialists, do not fall from the sky either, but the prevalence of diseases like cancer is likely to increase in the future, pathologists can use AI-based support to analyze more samples at the same time than before. .

The tools and methods are not effective enough

Another drawback for pathologists is that the tools and methods currently available for image analysis are not effective enough to meet the growing demands. The current methods are often manual and thus time consuming and self-prone.

Through AI-powered pattern recognition, in addition to their evaluation, pathologists also receive a diagnosis that is constructed on the basis of a comparison with similar patterns, which they can then evaluate.

The goal of the startup Cerenion, headquartered in Oulu in northern Finland, is nothing more than revolutionizing intensive care medicine. With the C-Trend Medical Devices Program, young entrepreneurs for the first time provided a solution to interpret the EEG for intensive care patients in real-time and permanent conditions during operations in the operating room.

According to its own information, the company aims to license the technology for monitoring brain function to large medical technology manufacturers. Cerenion is a branch of the University of Oulu in Northern Ostrobothnia and was established with the support of Business Finland.

The simple result shows brain activity

According to Cerenion, the software solution calculates a simple index based on a suite of standard EEG measurements with advanced ML and AI algorithms, which measure the state and function of the brain on a scale from 0 to 100.

Important to Nursing Staff: Changes in patient care are not necessary for this. A clinically validated measurement can be integrated as a software feature in EEG meters and patient monitors.