A woman rinses her mouth with a saline wash, at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, in Ramat Gan, Israel, Aug. 13, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Ammar Awad.

Israel’s largest medical center has teamed up with US tech giant Intel Corp. for an artificial intelligence-based algorithm that can help physicians more quickly diagnose Crohn’s disease.

The new application, developed by Sheba Medical Center using Intel hardware and software, takes two minutes to scan up to 12,000 images from capsule videos of patients’ digestive systems.

“Predicting the course of the disease in Crohn’s patients is one of the most important clinical challenges in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease,” said Prof. Uri Kopylov, Director of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases at Sheba’s Department of Gastroenterology. “However, currently available tools are limited and insufficiently accurate.”

In recent years, gastroenterologists have mainly used an endoscopic capsule, or camera pill — such as the swallowable PillCam, also developed by an Israeli company — that takes thousands of images as it moves through a patient’s body. But the vast amount of images in each video still need to be analyzed by physicians, making fast, accurate detection and treatment of the inflammatory disease more difficult, Sheba said.

In the US alone, there are over 1.6 million people diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease and more than 65,000 new patients diagnosed each year, according to a 2019 report.

The Sheba algorithm was tested as part of a research trial analyzing the capsule videos of 101 new Crohn’s patients. Results showed the application to be a more accurate diagnostic tool, producing 86 percent accuracy in image and data analysis, versus the 70 percent accuracy notched by a capsule endoscopy expert.

“The integration of AI within a health system, like Sheba, has the capacity to convert vast amounts of data into actionable insights, helping medical professionals to improve the overall health and well-being of individuals across the globe,” said Intel’s Israel manager Yaniv Garty.

The app will be used by physicians at Sheba in the coming months before being rolled out at medical centers and hospitals in Israel and abroad.