Precision Medicine MCDE Solution Uses

  • Urgent Care, Acute vs. Prolonged 
  • Cancer Biopsies 
  • Treatment Assessments 
  • Contrast Replacement 

Urgent Care, Acute vs. Prolonged 

The Gemini DT MCDE would be able to check for a broad spectrum of problems for every scan, even in the case where the scan is ordered because of an obvious and immediate problem. 
If a UC doctor is treating a patient for a broken collar bone, they’re unlikely to take the time to check for early indicators of other chest diseases. 
The MCDE would look for all these things equally regardless of the initial scan need. 


Cancer Biopsies 

The Gemini DT MCDE analytic is able to provide 3D structural maps at sub-millimeter resolution of the internal organs and tissues of a patient. 
One of the problems that persisted with this patient was that it was exceedingly difficult for a needle biopsy to get a clean sample of the damaged tissues in the liver lesions, which is why the open biopsy – a much more invasive, expensive, and painful operation – became necessary. 
With a clearer picture of internal structure, our goal is to improve the reliability of needle biopsies so that patients can be diagnosed more quickly and with greater accuracy at a time at which the right treatments can be the most effective. 

 


Treatment Assessments 

Example, a cancer patient had been undergoing chemotherapy for a tumor for six months and
was rescanned to assess progress.
Current practice is to draw a rectilinear bounding box around the tumor and measure its size. In this case, comparison of the patient’s new scan to that six months prior showed a slight increase in the tumor size, indicating that the treatment was not effective.
A closer examination of the scan data in which a doctor manually segmented the tissue and identified the tumor boundaries showed the opposite conclusion. 
The irregular shape of the tumor masked that it had in fact shrunk significantly, and in one dimension it had gotten longer, possibly from the patient just stretching more in that direction during the scan. As a result, the bounding box was larger, though the volume of cancer tissue had in fact gotten smaller.
Getting this assessment correct is vital for doctors to make good decisions about the treatment protocols for their
patients. The bounding-box method has inherent inaccuracies but is still in common use because of its simplicity and speed. 
Manually segmenting a scan to identify shape and size of a tumor can take several hours of a trained
clinician’s time, and even then, is subject to human error.
By automatically identifying tissue and organ structures within a scan, the Gemini DT MCDE can perform the
segmentation within seconds or minutes and will do so consistently across multiple scans. 
This saves tremendous
time and cost to the medical staff, and minimizes errors that can arise from comparative segmentation results
from different doctors or scans from various times or different machines.
In this case example, a few minutes would have been all that was needed to tell the doctor that the treatment in progress had been effective, and would have been able to say precisely the percentage volume reduction of the
tumor.
Time wasted from uncertain or mistaken diagnoses can be critical or deadly for many diseases, and especially cancers. 
In this case, unfortunately the patient grew too ill for surgery or transplant  passed 30 months after the splenectomy.

Contrast Reduction 

While chemical contrast agents are generally safe for most patients, there are increased risks for some with preexisting conditions. 
Diabetes is an example of this, as iodine-based contrasts are very stressful on the kidneys, and contrast-induced nephropathy is a cause of iatrogenic kidney damage.