Khosla Ventures, a United States venture capital firm, has invested $8 million in Zebra Medical Vision, an Israel-based start-up that is creating a database of anonymous medical images that could potentially be used to better identify illnesses and disease. The Zebra database consists mainly of x-ray images, CT scans, and MRI scans with all personal patient information such as names and addresses removed. Zebra hopes the new investment capital will allow the company to move its headquarters from Israel to the US and hire more staff.
According to Khosla Ventures, an extensive database that contains thousands of historical images, such as the one Zebra is developing, could be paired with a computer algorithm to help find anomalies in patients’ images more efficiently and identify disease more quickly.
Zebra obtains the de-identified data via its HMO partnerships in accordance with the companies’ data privacy compliance policy. Zebra has also partnered with companies in the medical imaging market in Israel and other countries to gather medical images. These healthcare organizations do not charge Zebra for the images because they expect to make use of the company’s data analysis in the future.
According to an article posted on Companies and Markets, a key challenge that has faced the US medical imaging market is the lack of high quality, detailed, and tagged datasets. Zebra reports that it intends to resolve this issue through its partnerships with healthcare companies.
A number of companies in the US medical imaging market will be looking towards Big Data solutions in order to help manage the rising data volumes, according to the Companies and Market article. For more information on the US medical imaging market, see the latest reports at US Medical Imaging Market.
