A start-up doing $1 medical scans to detect cancer is bringing its algorithms to Google Cloud
Zebra Medical Vision, an artificial intelligence (AI) health start-up, is collaborating with Google (GOOGL) to offer its algorithms on the search giant's cloud. The Israeli firm has created AI algorithms to read medical scans and detect anything untoward before humans can. Currently, its software can spot issues such as liver and lung disease and it is working on capabilities to recognize breast cancer and lung cancer. Zebra recently announced that all of its algorithms will be available to use for $1 per scan. So, each time a hospital uses the algorithm to study a medical scan it will be charged $1. But currently, Zebra's software is installed on-site, which can be costly for hospitals having to pay for servers to store the imaging. That's why Zebra is offering its algorithms on the Google Cloud. Major hospitals and health care systems are slowly moving their data storage to the cloud, which offers a cheaper way to keep large amounts of information. Companies like Microsoft (MSFT), Google and Amazon (AMZN) offer such services. But these technology giants also provide added services on top of their clouds, such as data analytics and AI capabilities. Both Microsoft and Amazon have special tools in the cloud focused on areas of medicine such as genomics or drug development. Google has been trying to push the health care side of its cloud platform in the past few months.
For Zebra offering the algorithms on the cloud could mean the ability to scale its business faster. "We see two strong trends coming to place — one is the urgent need for more scalable and secure storage for hospitals due to the overwhelming amounts of digital data. The other urgent need is how to analyze this data quickly and accurately to bring value to doctors and patients," Eyal Gura, Zebra Medical Vision co-founder and chairman, told CNBC. "The new collaboration we just announced with Google Cloud will enable hospitals and patients to realize value from both trends." It's important to note that Zebra is a customer of Google's Cloud and the two parties are not working on anything together currently for joint customers. Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect the nature of the relationship between Google and Zebra.
More From CNBC
