Kitchener-Waterloo artificial intelligence (AI) startup DarwinAI, has partnered with United States company Red Hat and Boston Children’s Hospital to accelerate the deployment of DarwinAI’s COVID-Net solution to hospitals and healthcare facilities.
The goal of the partnership is to make it easier for clinicians to use COVID-Net in hospitals.
First revealed in March, COVID-Net is a neural network for COVID-19 detection via chest radiography. The tool was created in collaboration with the University of Waterloo and is aimed to accelerate the development of highly accurate deep learning solutions for detecting COVID-19 cases.
DarwinAI and Red Hat are using the expertise of a computation research group, the Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, to focus the COVID-Net software for clinical and research use.
The aim of the new collaboration is to make it easier for clinicians to use COVID-Net in hospitals through a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that sits on top of Boston Children’s ChRIS Research Integration System, using Red Hat’s OpenShift platform.
Sheldon Fernandez, DarwinAI’s CEO, told BetaKit the startup open-sourced the COVID-Net neural network in March and it is being used in “dozens” of hospitals.
“The COVID-Net system is a promising tool, but needs to be coupled with a compelling GUI to be effective,” said Fernandez. “Boston Children’s ChRIS framework and the Red Hat OpenShift platform provides an effective way to get COVID-Net into the hands of health care professionals on the front lines.”
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Red Hat’s OpenShift platform is an open-source container application platform for enterprise application development and deployment.
Founded in 2017, DarwinAI emerged out of stealth with $3.9 million CAD in seed funding in September 2018. The company seeks to combat the “black box” problem, aiming to create explainable AI that allows enterprises to build AI models they can trust.
“COVID-19 impacts us all, and we are proud to have Red Hat OpenShift be an underlying technology in COVID-Net, a platform designed to better help frontline healthcare workers when it comes to understanding this complex disease,” said Chris Wright, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Red Hat.