What You Should Know:
– The Middle East’s largest hospital, Sheba Medical Center in Israel, just launched a breakthrough rapid COVID-19 detection test pilot program that enhances virus detection spectral technology and adapts it into rapid coronavirus testing.
– The innovative process uses an artificial intelligence
algorithm to separate the profile of a person infected with a specific virus,
from someone else who has a different virus or that of another healthy person.
Israel’s Sheba Medical Center, Tel HaShomer, the largest hospital in the Middle East, announces the launch of a pilot program for breakthrough rapid COVID-19 detection tests conceived by Newsight Imaging, an Israeli startup.
Rapid COVID-19 Detection Tests Pilot Program Overview
Sheba’s pilot program will conduct tests using Newsight’s
revolutionary spectral device based on its developed Spectrometer-on-Chip. The
device, which is about the size of a computer mouse, can identify and classify
evidence of a virus in the body in less than one second, using a sample of
fluid (blood serum or saliva sample) inserted into a disposable test cuvette.
This spectral technology for virus detection itself is not
the actual innovation, however. The new technological advance is Newsight’s
ability to bring an expensive device that typically costs hundreds of thousands
of dollars to be implemented in a single cost-effective chip, using an AI algorithm
to separate the profile of a human infected with a specific virus, from a human
infected with a different virus or from a healthy human.
Newsight’s device simultaneously checks 1024 spectral
channels, currently in the visible light spectrum of 400-700 nm. During the
next few months, the company plans to present a device that will be capable of
examining a spectral profile in wavelengths of up to 1100 nm.
Medical experts in the infectious and tropical disease
departments at Sheba Medical Center are already working with Newsight. Initial
feasibility studies of the device have shown an ability to separate between
alpha-coronaviruses (Alpha-CoV) and beta-coronaviruses (Beta-CoV), with an
accuracy close to 100 percent, in addition to feasibility studies conducted on
blood serum samples of people infected with the Dengue virus, which were found
to be extremely accurate.
Future Plans
Newsight and Sheba’s ARC Innovation Center headed by Dr. Eyal Zimlichman,
Chief Medical and Innovation Center at Sheba Medical Center, are planning to
establish a joint company that will make these solutions commercially available
to the medical community worldwide. Newsight Imaging’s previous machine vision
chips are already integrated in dozens of different devices and solutions in
the automotive, robotics, and advanced industrial manufacturing fields.
