Verily today said it opened a new R&D center in Israel to focus on applying artificial intelligence in healthcare.
The Israel-based team will focus on applying AI to biomedical problems, including applications in endoscopy, minimally invasive surgery and other imaging modalities. The center will continue early research conducted by Google Health and Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center on using AI in the detection of colonic polyps.
“Through this collaboration, we have introduced a highly precise model using AI to identify and map colonic polyps in ways that will enhance diagnosis and treatment. This represents how close partnerships between clinical and technology leaders can have very significant and lasting benefits for the medical community,” Eran Goldin, director of the Digestive Diseases Institute at Shaare Zedek, said in a news release.
Verily’s Israel team will be co-located with Google in Haifa and Tel Aviv and will be led by Ehud Rivlin, who is a professor of computer science at the Technion and also worked with Google Health.
“AI has great potential impact in healthcare and biomedicine, and the research collaboration between Google Health and Shaare Zedek shows the promise of using AI for medical applications. We’re excited about Verily coming to Israel, advancing the research collaborations, and bringing together Verily’s approach to healthcare, data science and technology with Israeli innovation and its advanced healthcare system,” Yossi Matias, VP of engineering and research at Google and head of Google’s engineering center in Israel, said.