Ezra makes full-body MRI more accessible for early cancer diagnosis

On an overcast day in a nondescript building in downtown Los Angeles, Decrypt is invited to delve deeper into technology that uses artificial intelligence to help doctors better identify cancer cells in the body. The technology is being developed by New York-based medical technology firm Ezra, and the company offered a first-hand experience with the Ezra MRI scanner.

With diseases like cancer becoming more and more prevalent every year, Ezra says he's targeting a narrow — but important — constituency. Early detection of cancer is critical to treating and surviving the deadly disease, and that's what Ezra is doing, he said. Using whole-body scans and artificial intelligence to diagnose more accessible and faster treatments.

“[Early detection] It makes a big difference to every patient, and it makes a big difference to the medical system,” Ezra's medical advisor, Dr. Daniel Sodickson, told Decrypt. “Five-year cancer survival rates have gone from 20% to 80%, on average, if caught early, so if you do the numbers, that's about a billion lives saved.”

Sodickson says the key to early detection is a full-body scan, rather than focusing on just one part of the body or just the symptom. According to Ezra, Scanner It targets several important sites including the brain, thyroid, uterus, prostate, lungs, liver and kidneys.

The nearest Ezra facility to me was at the corner of Wilshire Blvd and Robertson in the heart of Beverly Hills. The first thing that struck me when I walked into the office where the scan was done was how brightly lit and surprisingly busy it was on a Monday morning. While waiting for my appointment at 9:30 am, I looked around the office and found it full of people of various age groups, from children to the elderly.

“We get a lot of people who are claustrophobic and can't sit in a normal MRI machine,” one technician told me.

“[Ezra] It's a set of very specific tests for each part of the body,” Sodickson continued. “There's a new and growing paradigm in medicine called active surveillance — if you have a risk for prostate cancer or breast cancer, for example — we'll go back every year to see how you're doing, and to make sure your risk hasn't changed,” he said.

Ezra states that he recorded each of these tests for each part of the body and later put them together. But while the Erza Scan does a full-body scan, Sodickson admits the machine doesn't do a full-body scan of the spine.

“Partly because spinal tumors are not among the most common,” Sodickson said. “So it's a time budget; the longer we keep you in the scanner, the more comfortable and more expensive it is for you.

I put on a gown and lay down on the bed that led to the MRI scanner. With a head restraint, a soft pad on my chest, and a pad to elevate my legs, I stepped into the fast MRI machine.Ezra flash” Scan.

What followed was 30 minutes of screaming, yelling, whistling and me trying to keep quiet. The place was not comfortable; It uses a larger MRI machine tube diameter (70 cm bore size) compared to the standard model.60 cm height)It helped me not feel claustrophobic.

The worst but most important part of the experience was when the collar on the gown was riding up my neck as I couldn't move, which was very annoying. During the experience, as the yelling and screaming and yelling continued, I meditated and said what I could remember to calm myself down. I tried not to think about the time and to remember to breathe.

As soon as I lay in the tube it stopped, 30 minutes felt like hours. Eventually, though, it was over, and I pulled out of the machine to preserve my hopefully negative result.

A week after my scan, I received an email from Ezra that my results had been processed and uploaded to my Ezra account. The areas found by the Ezra Flash Report scan should be reviewed with my primary care physician at a follow-up appointment.

The report includes a “Risk Score” drop-down that explains the level of severity included in each section, from 1 (no monitoring required) to 5 (emergency action required).

I have to be honest; Seeing the words “potential cancer” made me do a double take, and when I started to worry, I read more and made the report through ChatGPT and tried to explain what all the medical terms meant. While I still have reason to be concerned, knowing that the locations are likely to be good gives me hope that things will be more cautious than anything else.

However, a follow-up appointment will definitely happen.

When the report is run, Ezra offers customers the ability to download the report as a PDF for viewing and as a digital file for medical professionals to review. The most interesting aspect of the report is the digital report, which includes a 360-degree shot of the scanned area and allows you to adjust the depth of the image.

Along with the MRI scan, Ezra uses artificial intelligence to perform high quality, fast and cheap scans.

“The way we do it faster is we can take less data than would normally be required,” Sodickson said. “It can be used to get a perfectly clear MRI scan or MRI image, to remove AI blur, to clean a shower door and bring it back to full resolution in no time.”

The company said that Yezrah AI was trained on a large collection of images of thousands of patients – healthy and with various diseases – with results evaluated by human radiologists.

According to Ezra, his proprietary AI model Ezra Flash takes about 30 minutes to complete a full-body MRI scan. With Ezra Flash, Ezra Reporter AI creates digestible interpretations of radiology reports that help clinicians and patients understand their results.

“The only people who have access to your scanned information are the medical team and the Ezra clinical operations team,” an Ezra spokesperson said in an email. “Ezra is governed by HIPAA and all applicable privacy and security regulations. Ezra may delete your information upon request in accordance with its Privacy Policy.

Thanks to consumer-facing AI models such as Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT, patients and their families have been able to use the technology to decipher complex medical terminology and terminology that would otherwise have been confusing and families unable to properly advocate for their sick family members. .

During the annual Healthy Longevity Global Innovators Summit in October, Peter LeeMicrosoft's Vice President of Corporate Research and Incubation detailed how their family used ChatGPIT to care for their aging father.

“Being able to give us GPT guidance has kept the temperature down and family harmony,” Lee said. “What I'm always interested in is empowering the people themselves, the people who care for us as we live longer and as we age, and I have really high hopes for that.”

With the rise of artificial intelligence, medical professionals have used the technology to identify and diagnose difficult-to-treat diseases. covid 19, Parkinson's diseaseAnd Cancer.

In October, new Research It was published in an international journal Nature It introduced an AI-powered concept called Sturgeon that aims to change how surgeons approach the diagnosis and removal of central nervous system (CNS) tumors.

“The problem is [the Sturgeon researchers] What surgeons are trying to solve is that they don't have the real-time or instant knowledge to diagnose tumors during disease. Dr. A.S. Gabriel ZadaKeck Medicine, a neurosurgeon at USC, told us. Decrypt.

Dr. Zada ​​Keck and other medical and academic institutions are increasingly turning to AI, adding that AI tools are being used across the board before, during and after surgery.

“The complexity of the surgery doesn't change; the risks don't necessarily change,” Zada ​​said. “But if you get information that improves the way someone performs surgery, you can imagine that something will be safer if you get more information that will change what you do one day.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.