Pentavere’s AI improves head/neck cancer staging

TORONTO – HEALWELL AI Inc., a data science and AI company focused on preventative care, is pleased to announce that its subsidiary Pentavere Research Group Inc., has partnered with Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Dr. Tony Eskander (pictured), a globally recognized head and neck surgical oncologist to demonstrate how Pentavere’s DARWEN AI platform can help improve cancer staging to support treatment decisions and improve patient outcomes.

Results of this collaboration were presented at the prestigious American Head and Neck Society annual conference and published in JAMA Otolaryngology, which is the highest impact journal for head and neck cancers.

This is the first published paper of its kind demonstrating artificial intelligence analyzing unstructured clinical text within electronic health records to accurately support the automation and acceleration of cancer staging for complex head and neck cancers.

This work underscores the potential of AI in enhancing patient care and oncological decision-making and demonstrates the potential impact of AI powered clinical decision support as a Co-pilot to physicians to improve cancer patient outcomes.

Aaron Leibtag, co-founder and CEO at Pentavere, commented, “This exciting collaboration with Dr. Eskander and his team shows how Pentavere’s DARWEN AI platform has the ability to support the critical decision-making processes of clinicians, ensuring they remain central to patient care.

“It is further proof of our mission to be a leading AI Decision Support for disease detection and preventative care that is supported by peer reviewed validation and partnerships of the highest quality and reputation. To our knowledge this is the first validation of this nature ever published in a peer reviewed publication.”

Dr. Eskander and his team at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre partnered with Pentavere to assess the use of DARWEN AI to improve cancer staging. The results highlighted in the JAMA paper found AI has the potential to enhance patient care and oncological decision-making.

“Head and neck cancers are incredibly complex to stage and up to 75% of patients don’t have an accurate stage documented within the first 6 weeks,” said Dr. Eskander.

He continued, “Pentavere’s AI DARWEN allows clinicians to rapidly make sense of varied clinical documentation buried within the electronic medical record and accurately predict early vs late-stage cancers. Automating this capability as part of a physician Co-pilot for clinical decision support would be a game changer for cancer treaters and ultimately help improve outcomes for patients.”

The Canadian Cancer Society reports that approximately 8,000 Canadians are diagnosed with head and neck cancers each year and over 2,000 will die from it.

For clinicians to make the best treatment and prognosis decisions requires accurate and timely staging of the cancer but this often doesn’t happen or is poorly documented. This directly impacts patient outcomes and the ability of the institution to evaluate pathways, quality, and survival. For these reasons clear documentation of cancer stage is a recognized metric of quality cancer care.

DARWEN, Pentavere’s AI platform, unlocks a deeper understanding of patient treatment needs by enabling effortless data access and rapid insight generation. DARWEN harnesses EMR data and utilizes advanced large language models to analyze disparate and siloed clinical notes that are otherwise very challenging to access, allowing meaningful solutions to some of healthcare’s biggest challenges and delivering on the current need for medicine to become more personalized.