Robots in Rheumatoid Arthritis treatment
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disease affecting around 1% of the world’s population. The disease causes swelling and pain in the joints, and if left untreated, it can cause stiffness, joint destruction, and disabilities. RA can lead to reduced quality of life and diminished work capacity.
RA has become more widespread among the elderly, and with the worldwide population increasingly aging, RA is soon going to present a larger problem for a health care system.
Early detection, followed by monitoring, plays a key role in managing and treating the disease. Ultrasound examination of joints has proven to be a sensitive imaging tool for detecting signs of early disease and evaluate arthritis activity in established disease. Unfortunately, ultrasound examinations have a long waiting list that delays the patients’ treatments.
ROPCA’s ultrasound platform ARTHUR and the artificial intelligence DIANA present a solution, to both the increasing number of RA patients, the hospital cost, and the lack of specialists.
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- ARTHUR (ARTHritis Ultrasound Robot) interacts directly with the patient without the need of a doctor, thereby allocating more time the doctor can use elsewhere.
- Only 1 out of every 17 patient the doctor sees do in fact have RA. ARTHUR can be a part of the initial assessment and help prioritize the worst cases first.
- ARTHUR is designed as a plug-n-play system compatible with the ultrasound machines in the clinics possession, thereby saving cost.
DIANA (Diagnosis Aid Network for Rheumatoid Arthritis) is the assistant tool for evaluating and monitoring the disease activity in the joints scanned by ARTHUR.
- DIANA can be used together with ARTHUR, allowing automatic scanning, analysis and journal generation.
- The journals can be used by doctors in the diagnosing and monitoring of patients with RA.
- DIANA can be used as a standalone system used on manually captured ultrasound images.
The DIANA software system is based on state-of-the-art neural networks used for image analysis. The networks have been trained on thousands of ultrasound images, which have been acquired and labeled by expert rheumatologists, making the system able to classify the degree of RA according to the EULAR-OMERACT standards for diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis.
RoPCA’s dedicated AI team is continuously working on improving DIANA to optimize performance and to increase transparency in the prediction pipeline. RoPCA works closely with experts in this field to achieve this vision.