Radiologists frequently have to analyze several thousand images from a single MRI scan each day. And their patients naturally expect them to give every diagnosis the same level of concentration, so no mistakes are made and nothing is missed.

It’s a difficult job that the founders of the start-up Fuse-AI want to simplify and improve. So they’ve developed a solution that helps doctors detect cancer. “The goal is to give radiologists a computer-assisted second opinion that makes their job easier and their diagnoses more reliable and accurate at the end of the day,” says Maximilian Waschka, one of the four Fuse-AI founders.

The Hamburg-based entrepreneurs founded their start-up in 2015 to develop artificial intelligence capable of detecting indications of cancer – such as carcinomas – and classifying possible tumors as benign or malignant after analyzing MRI scans. According to Fuse-AI, this method lowers the costs heath insurers pay for MRI examinations by at least 10 percent.

The entrepreneurs rely on IT resources from the Open Telekom Cloud for their in-depth analysis. The MRI scans are sent encrypted via the Internet to Deutsche Telekom’s highly secure data centers in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where they are then analyzed. The cloud intelligence notes any abnormalities, adds metadata to the images and then sends it back to the physician.

The four entrepreneurs submitted their idea to TechBoost, Deutsche Telekom’s program for promising digital start-ups, and were accepted. Since then, the company has benefited from €100,000 worth of IT resources from the Open Telekom Cloud. “The Open Telekom Cloud is a wonderful instrument giving us both the flexibility and scalability necessary to realize this kind of solution,” says Dirk Schäfer, a machine learning expert and co-founder of Fuse-AI.

But detecting carcinomas is just the beginning. “In the future we want to use the Open Telekom Cloud to help make it easier to detect many widespread diseases more reliably and faster,” says Sabrina Reimers-Kipping, a biochemist and Fuse-AI co-founder.

For example, the founders have developed together with dermatologists a so-called digital dermatoscope to aid skin cancer prevention. The dermatoscope uses a camera to take pictures of the skin’s surface, which are then analyzed by an intelligent algorithm in the cloud. The system alerts the physician to any abnormalities it discovers. “We’re not just reducing the effort for doctors and healthcare system costs, we’re also increasing a patient’s chance of recovery,” says Reimers-Kipping. “Because the earlier diseases are detected, the better the prospects for curing them.”

• Company: Fuse-AI
• Headquarters: Hamburg
• Industry: Healthcare/Software (SaaS)

The company:
Fuse-AI provides radiologist with cloud-assisted diagnosis help. Its intelligent algorithm analyzes MRI scans detects, notes and classifies them as benign or malignant tumors. This improves the quality, speed and reliability of making a diagnosis while simultaneously sinking healthcare costs.

The challenge:
To realize their vision, the Fuse-AI founders required reliable, secure and flexibly scalable cloud resources. Analyzing MRI scans consumes massive amounts of processing capacity at peak times. But it would be unaffordable for the start-up to keep this unused power constantly in reserve.

The solution:
So the Hamburg-based entrepreneurs turned to the Open Telekom Cloud. Since then, the start-up has scalable IT resources available at all times. Telekom’s certified and highly secure data centers are located in Germany and the Trusted Cloud Data Protection Profile (TDCP) 1.0 confirms that the Open Telekom Cloud already conforms to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The result:
Fuse-AI now relies on IT capacity from Deutsche Telekom’s certified and highly secure data centers in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt for its cloud-assisted MRI analysis. The start-up is now planning to expand its cloud-based solution to help doctors with the diagnosis of many other widespread diseases.

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