Paweł Paczuski, co-founder of upmedic, says that the system was created to help their radiologist friend solve a professional dilemma. “She asked me if there was a way to streamline her work. She had to document the findings of huge amounts of X-ray images and it was all very time-consuming. Together with my brother, we analyzed how a typical tele-radiologist works and we decided that a lot of what they did was repetitive and manual. We decided to look for a solution.

It turned out that there had been several attempts globally to solve this, but none of them were adopted on a large scale.

When creating upmedic, the Paczuski brothers assumed that the solution would not only streamline doctors’ work, but it would also help patients to better understand test results, which they often spent months waiting for. More extensive and better structured descriptions of MRI, CT or ultrasound findings have a significant impact on further treatment decisions.

Besides offering templates with standardized vocabulary and well-structured organ descriptions, which, in a sense, force doctors to generate uniform documents, upmedic is also compatible with traditional medical records. “Our system relies on deep learning techniques to search medical records originating from traditional medical systems for entities which can be used to discover knowledge in existing documentation and to automatically detect ICD-10 codes,” the WUT graduate explains. He presented his team’s language processing accomplishments at the SNOMED CT International Expo 2020.

When pitching the project to the Pitch&Bridge jury, upmedic Growth Manager Sophia Renteria emphasized that the solution developed by Krzysztof and Paweł Paczuski is compatible with systems delivered by various vendors, while at the same time being comprehensible to medical doctors of various specializations. She also underscored that the documentation it can generate can be easily translated into any foreign language. Among other factors, it was the system’s exceptional flexibility that won our University’s representatives the first prize.

The winners will use the CAD 20,000 award to organize pilot programs and build partnerships with foreign sites. “During the next three months we will be working to implement our system at Canadian clinics and we hope that this will mark the beginning of our further expansion,” says Krzysztof Paczuski.

In Poland, upmedic has been adopted by a chain of medical clinics in Łódź. Analyses have shown that the system has tripled the pace of doctors’ work, which means that three times as many patients can receive the assistance they need within the same period of time and with the same quality of service.