Naitive Technologies, a community health firm, has secured £334K co-funding from Develop British under the Biomedical Catalyst competition, to improve the accessibility of its osteoporosis screening technology, OsteoSight.

Osteoporosis is a huge international health problem. Every season, it leads to 37 million injuries and prices health systems billions. It is frequently undiagnosed and undertreated, and absorption of testing, which uses a devoted scan called a DEXA, is reduced. Some cases are only recognized when it’s too late, and a dislocation has already occurred. The important to changing this image might be greedy screen.

X-rays are amongst the most common, most available, and most cost-effective diagnostic test performed. Each year, thousands of X-rays are taken for a wide variety of purposes. These tests contain a lot of information that has so far not been accessible. OsteoSight comes into play in this regard. Researchers at Naitive Technologies have developed a method using artificial intelligence that extracts fresh, medically important information from these daily X-rays without requiring extra equipment or time from the doctors. OsteoSight automatically determines a person’s bone mineral density ( BMD), a crucial indicator of bone health, by opportunistically screening X-rays and alerts the interpreting physician if a patient is at risk of having low BMD. Finding these people before they break you help doctors provide more effective and powerful care.

By combining back and neck X-rays into their software, Naitive will be able to increase the number of people who stand to gain from unscrupulous screening with OsteoSight thanks to the Innovate UK Biomedical Catalyst co-funding of this project. Now, the technology can be used on leg and hip X-rays, and by adding neck and neck X-rays, the team will be able to achieve more than an extra 40 % of all X-rays performed. OsteoSight’s growth into neck and chest X-rays produces another advantage. The back, which is noticeable on these X-rays, is an area of high metabolic activity and, thus, one of the earliest places to experience decline in bone mineral density, making it ideal for early recognition of osteoarthritis.

Dr. Will Briggs, CEO of Naitive, said:” We are thrilled to declare that with the help of Innovate UK, Naitive is able to improve the availability of our fracture pre-screening tool. Millions more people stand to gain from a more effective treatment system and a significantly improved ability to recognize and treat fracture as a result of this growth.

This most recent grant comes in response to a number of other announcements from Naitive, including one that was announced in December 2023 and the US Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ) designating a device as a breakthrough device.

On The FemTech Series, you can talk to Cat Kelly, the chief operating officer at Naitive, talk about the application.