The Israeli company Kahun has developed an innovative tool that will greatly help doctors: An artificial intelligence engine for clinical thinking based on medical literature.
Kahun, founded in 2018 by Dr. Michal Tzuchman-Katz and hi-tech entrepreneurs Tal Goldberg and Eitan Ron, supports and improves medical decision-making processes through medical knowledge mapping and artificial intelligence.
The tech developed is based on the world's largest evidentiary medical knowledge mapping, and on the same principles that skilled doctors rely on.
The company states that to reach an accurate diagnosis, doctors mediate between their medical knowledge and experience and the patient's symptoms, testimony and test results. This process isn't measurable and isn't currently carried out according to a uniform standard or government standards, which can lead to missing important details, unnecessary tests, referrals to the wrong specialists and loss of precious time in making a diagnosis.
Until today, artificial intelligence tools for doctors were based on data, patient files and research from experts in the medical field. Kahun's system simulates clinical thinking in a transparent way based on medical literature.
How does the platform work?
The platform is built from two main components. First is a graph based on a comprehensive mapping of internal medicine knowledge. The knowledge graph contains more than 30,000,000 insights regarding thousands of diseases and findings and includes statistical connections both causal and associative, incidence and prevalence data of diseases, sensitivity and specificity of findings and the like.
Second, there's an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of receiving a representation of a patient, scanning the knowledge graph and generating insights in real time regarding suggestions for differential diagnosis and to manage the investigative process optimally.
The first app launched is a chatbot that allows medical organizations that treat patients remotely, and clinics in general, to perform initial questioning before meeting the doctor. The algorithm recalculates at any given moment a differential diagnosis, i.e. a list of relevant diseases, which is updated according to data provided by the patient, as well as the next question a patient is asked. At the end of the process, the system exports a summary of a relevant diagnosis to the attending doctor.
The company recently announced raising seed money of $8,000,000 led by the British fund LocalGlobe. With pre-seed fundraising, the total is $13,000,000. The EIC fund of the European Union and the TFK fund of Waze founder Uri Levine also participated in the last fundraising round.
Ron, co-founder and CEO of Kahun, stated that expanded funding allows Kahun to take a significant step forward towards building the most extensive medical knowledge map in the world and making it accessible to doctors.
The tech is built on the same building blocks that skilled doctors rely on. Kahun is proud that they developed a digital medical advisor that speaks to doctors in their own language.