Edinburgh, Scotland (November 16th, 2023) – Blackford, the pioneering strategic AI platform and solutions provider, and contextflow today announced a commercial partnership to bring contextflow’s ADVANCE Chest CT solution to healthcare professionals.
Under the partnership, contextflow’s innovative technology will be integrated with Blackford’s advanced enterprise AI platform. Blackford provides healthcare professionals access to an extensive portfolio of medical AI solutions designed to drive clinical efficiency and improve patient outcomes. By integrating contextflow’s advanced detection technology into the Blackford platform, Blackford can offer healthcare providers a powerful tool for detecting ILD, COPD and lung cancer on chest CTs.
« Blackford exists to improve the lives of patients and populations – we can do this by providing tailored AI solutions to healthcare providers around the world to help enhance therapy selection and treatment optimisation », said Ben Panter, CEO of Blackford. « We are delighted to partner with contextflow to add their advanced tools for lung disease detection, quantification and monitoring of disease progression to our AI portfolio.”
contextflow’s CE and UKCA marked technology, ADVANCE Chest CT, offers radiologists comprehensive computer-aided detection support for lung cancer, ILD, and COPD patients. The software detects, visualizes and quantifies nodules and lung disease patterns to enhance the speed and quality of radiology reports. Its upcoming malignancy scoring feature has been shown to not only detect lung cancer sooner but also to reduce both false positives and false negatives (*Adams, Scott J et al., JACR September 2022).
As contextflow’s Chief Commercial Officer Marcel Wassink puts it, “Successful implementation of lung cancer screening programs will require the use of assistive AI to help with earlier detection and manage the workloads. We also understand that lung cancer is only one of many findings relevant to the patient’s wellbeing, and thus we are proud to offer comprehensive support for chest CT that goes beyond cancer to include ILD, COPD, and in the near future, incidental pulmonary embolism. Our partnership with Blackford will accelerate the adoption of this much-needed AI, increasing its accessibility to radiologists and patients alike.”
About Blackford
Blackford are pioneers in the radiology AI space, with over a decade of experience working in partnership with leading hospitals and ground-breaking technology providers. We operate as a strategic AI partner, providing access to a tried-and-tested core platform, tailored services, and a portfolio of 100+ applications to help healthcare providers unlock the value of AI and improve patient outcomes.
Our collaboration and recent arms-length acquisition by Bayer ensures that our customers and partners have the support and long-term security needed to underpin successful AI strategies.
To learn more about Blackford’s tailored approach to AI solutions visit www.blackfordanalysis.com.
About contextflow
contextflow is a spin-off of the Medical University of Vienna (MUW) and European research project KHRESMOI, supported by the Technical University of Vienna (TU). Founded by a team of AI and engineering experts in July 2016, the company has a strong interest in bringing state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to the market e.g. improved emphysema detection and lung segmentation. Its computer-aided detection software ADVANCE Chest CT is CE Marked and available for clinical use within Europe under the new MDR. Visit contextflow.com for more information.