IMADIS, a Lyon-based company specializing in remote radiology for emergencies, announced on March 2 the upcoming opening of two new on-call centers in Clermont-Ferrand and Dijon, adding to the five already present in the region, which work for some 100 institutions (in Lyon, Saint Etienne, Bordeaux, Marseille and Rennes). This medical teleradiology service, unique in Europe, offers new opportunities for organizing on-call and emergency care in hospitals.

Alexandre Ben Cheikh, Nicolas Girouin, Charles Journé, Vincent Mougenot and Vivien Thomson, radiologists at Hospices Civils de Lyon, co-founded IMADIS in 2008, an external structure dedicated to managing teleradiology emergencies at any time of the day or night. An initial two-year partnership with the Saint-Joseph / Saint-Luc Hospital Center in Lyon, which entrusted the company with its permanent imaging care, proved conclusive and enabled the IMADIS project to take shape in 2009. Since then, about a hundred public and private hospitals in France and overseas have benefited from the shared and centralized management of emergency radiology activities. Vivien Thomson, president and co-founder of IMADIS explains:

“We have modeled ourselves on the Samu and their regulation rooms. When a patient arrives at the emergency room of a hospital, he or she is taken care of by a doctor and in 40% of cases, an imaging will be performed. The emergency physician then makes a request on the IMADIS teleradiology portal, which is then validated by a regulating radiologist before establishing a management protocol. The medical images reach us in one to two minutes. A small group of 15 radiologists spread over the five IMADIS centers will handle the various requests. On average, we have a turnaround time of 16 minutes from the time the image is received to the time the result is communicated. And for strokes, it’s nine minutes.

To the on-call center in Lyon created in 2009, were added the one in Bordeaux in 2018, the one in Marseille in 2020, the ones in Saint Etienne and Rennes in 2021, and in 2022, the centers in Clermont-Ferrand and Dijon will host the IMADIS medical teams.

A total of 300 radiologists are involved in on-call duty and 114 radiologists are associated with the company. ” They are involved in supervision, training and also in the development of our scientific center,” adds the president of IMADIS. Three radiologists are on call during the day, while about 15 are on call at night. Hospitals use the company’s services more often at night, on weekends and holidays.

Teleradiology and AI: augmented radiology

IMADIS uses ITIS, a SaaS platform for managing radiology and teleradiology examinations for 24-hour emergencies as well as for standard radiography reviews, developed by Deeplink Medical.

The Lyon-based company has been working for three years with Aidoc, an Israeli company specializing in artificial intelligence, to integrate AI analysis into this platform. Scans are systematically analyzed by one or more algorithms to detect intracranial hemorrhages or pulmonary embolisms. In fact, five algorithms are operational on a daily basis. Vivien Thomson confirms:

“Every year, we employ, one, two or even three new AI algorithms. Radiologists are indeed very demanding. They want to integrate these field tools into their diagnosis. The major issue is detection.

According to the company, ” An internal evaluation study showed that AI allowed the diagnosis to be corrected in 0.5% of cases for intracranial hemorrhage and 1% for pulmonary embolism. This may seem small in relative terms, but with nearly 800 patients being managed every day, the gain for the patient is significant.”

Standard radiography and AI

A second partnership was signed with Gleamer, a “French Medtech player”, for the use of the BoneView solution, which facilitates the detection of fractures on standard X-rays, and which, according to a study published in the journal Radiology, could reduce missed fractures by 30%. IMADIS uses this solution for emergency radiography review. The comparison of the patient’s management by the emergency physician and the review by a specialized radiologist allows the detection of discrepancies and the correction of errors.

IMADIS is currently in the comparative evaluation phase of 3 AI software for fracture detection.

Integration of AI in the ITIS platform

Optimal use of AI tools can only be achieved when they are highly integrated into the workflow. A joint development work between Deeplink Medical and AIDOC has allowed the integration of AI analysis in ITIS leading to a real gain in time and efficiency.

Recruiting, an imperative for the growing company

IMADIS, in full expansion, is recruiting new radiologists to continue its partnerships and create new ones. Vivien Thomson assures:

“To recruit radiologists, we focus on what motivates them most: teamwork, working conditions that we want to be the best possible. And of course the remuneration: we pay them about double the standard remuneration for a hospital shift.”

Translated from IMADIS : l’Intelligence Artificielle au service de la téléradiologie des services d’urgence