This week Diagnostic Robotics announced that they have raised $45 million in Series B financing. This round was led by StageOne investors with participation from Mayo Clinic, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and Bradley Bloom, co-founder of Berkshire Partners. The company will also become a Mayo Clinic Platform portfolio company. This round brings the company's total financing to $85 million. Diagnostic Robotics uses AI based predictive models to help patients manage chronic conditions and reduce emergency room visits.

Kira Radinsky, co-founder and Chairman of Diagnostic Robotics, wants to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. The lessons learned from initial deployments of the startup's AI-based digital triage platform in Israel and the U.S. and the valuable experience gained during the Covid-19 pandemic, point to a future of better healthcare: Providing the right treatment at the right time in the most appropriate setting. At the Mayo Clinic, Diagnostic Robotics' triage platform suggests possible diagnoses and provides a risk score for each patient based on their answers to questions regarding their medical conditions. The Mayo Clinic's Dr. John Halamka calls it "Waze for healthcare," stressing its use as a navigation system, matching patients with the right healthcare resource at the hospital's emergency room or even before they arrive there. The State of Rhode Island has used Diagnostic Robotics' platform to help manage its response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In late January, scientists at DeepMind, Google's London-based AI unit, gathered to discuss whether there was anything they could do to help fight the brewing coronavirus pandemic. At the time, the spread of Covid-19 was still largely confined to the city of Wuhan, but as case numbers continued to grow exponentially, machine learning experts from London to San Francisco were gearing up to try and harness the power of AI to fight the Sars-CoV-2 virus. "Our first reaction was to think how we might be able to help," says Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind. "Front of mind was our system, AlphaFold, which we had shown could predict the 3D structure of proteins with unprecedented accuracy compared to other computational methods." At the start of March, DeepMind released predictions generated by AlphaFold for the structures of various proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, to try and accelerate the process of understanding how the virus functions.

Healthcare systems have adopted artificial intelligence in fits and starts. For years, emergency rooms have haltingly tested AI systems that collect information on patients' symptoms and medical histories, weigh it against data about similar cases, and make recommendations about who should be rushed in for treatment first. Doctors see the potential, but are wary of algorithms that don't have years of medical training. But the risk of Covid-19 transmission in ERs, along with shortages of staff and resources, have left some hospitals with no choice. The pandemic has dramatically accelerated the use of AI triage.

As the number of people who've tested positive for coronavirus is mounting and could reach 2 million in the coming days, Israeli innovators are harnessing artificial intelligence technologies to curb the global pandemic, perhaps the most challenging public health crisis in modern history. What we know already is that scientists and researchers are working diligently to find treatments and to develop a vaccine for coronavirus. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence technologies are emerging as key solutions to combatting coronavirus, and Israel is well positioned in this field. Israel is well known for its strength in deep-tech, and is also home to a vibrant AI ecosystem that has been growing rapidly over the past few years. Israel's unique tech ecosystem includes companies and startups that utilize AI technologies in healthcare, cybersecurity, autonomous driving, and many other fields.

Can artificial intelligence (AI) predict future events? Successful serial entrepreneur, award-winning inventor, scientist, and technology innovator Kira Radinsky, Ph.D., has an expert's point of view and first-hand experience to answer that question. She is a member of the United Nations Secretary-General's high-level panel on digital cooperation that is chaired by Melinda Gates, Co-Chair of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jack Ma, the Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group. Radinsky is the Co-Founder, Chairwoman, and Chief Technology Officer of Diagnostic Robotics, a health care artificial intelligence (AI) system with predictive analytics, with locations in Tel-Aviv and New York City. In early November 2019, she successfully raised $24 million in Series A venture capital financing led by Accelmed Ventures with other investors for the two-year-old technology startup.