Challening the status quo of healthcare: Jonas Muff tells us about the vision behind Vara
Summary
Vara began as a project at venture studio Merantix in Berlin, in which people from different backgrounds, all with entrepreneurial mindsets, were brought together to tackle real-world problems in innovative ways. We assembled a team of machine learning experts, software developers, product designers, entrepreneurs and radiologists, and set out to reimagine the breast cancer screening workflow from the bottom up. With this in mind, we partnered with some of Germany’s leading screening radiologists to build a platform that standardises the entire clinical workflow and enhances it through the use of advanced AI, automation and data management tools. It has been trained and evaluated on more than 7 million images to date – one of the largest datasets of its kind globally – and our AI is continuously monitored to provide screening radiologists with key performance metrics. One recently peer-reviewed paper, published in the European Journal of Radiology, found that Vara’s AI can correctly detect interval breast cancers in prior screening mammograms, including in some cases with no discernible suspicious signs.