VisionLabs announced its entry into the medical image recognition and analysis market

Domestic developers of solutions for recognizing faces, silhouettes and images are trying to diversify their product portfolios. Thus, VisionLabs announced its entry into the market of recognition and analysis of medical images. NTech Lab also decided to work in this direction: the company has already received patents for the corresponding software and is considering entering other markets, including agriculture. Experts note that players are not looking for new clients because of a good life – the facial recognition market in the Russian Federation is already saturated.

The Russian developer of solutions in the field of face and silhouette recognition VisionLabs (99% owned by MTS) has developed a solution for recognizing malignant kidney tumors in computed tomography images, a company representative told Kommersant, adding that the project took about a year.

The company sees large medical centers, clinics and laboratories as the main consumers of the product: “The solution is now available at the Center for Diagnostics and Telemedicine at the Moscow Department of Health. We are also conducting several pilots, but these projects are under non-disclosure agreements.” During this year, VisionLabs expects to earn about 50 million rubles from implementing the solution.

VisionLabs is not the only facial recognition vendor that has decided to enter the medical technology market. One of the largest suppliers of software for face and image recognition, NTech Lab, also intends to develop projects related to the recognition of medical images.

In the summer of 2023, the company registered three patents for software related to supporting medical decision-making, Kommersant discovered in the SPARK-Interfax database. These are NTechMed Norm Brain, NTechMed MRI Brain and NTechMed CT Brain – all of which deal with the analysis of MRI images of the brain.

The Kommersant company explained that they already have several ready-made products for analyzing medical images. NTech Lab CEO Alexey Palamarchuk added that the company as a whole is expanding its line of products based on artificial intelligence and is “preparing to launch solutions for agriculture, the social sphere, and the B2C segment in general.”

At the end of the first half of 2023, the volume of the Russian medical technology market amounted to 17 billion rubles, which is 27.5% more than the same period last year, Forbes wrote, citing Smart Ranking data.

There are currently no “clear and independent” estimates of the volume of the market for AI solutions in healthcare, says Webiomed development director Alexander Gusev: “Taking into account the available data on the volume of government procurement of medical products with AI for the past year – which is about 500 million rubles, as well as information about targeted implementations of solutions in commercial clinics, I would estimate the size of the market for AI solutions in medicine in the Russian Federation at 1 billion rubles.”

The market for solutions based on computer vision today is already highly saturated, the development of facial recognition technologies has reached a technological plateau, so product development is focused on the application level, notes Andrey Khrulev, director of business development for biometric systems at the TsRT group of companies.

“I think that developers of solutions in the field of facial recognition have serious accumulated competencies that, in addition to city security, can be applied to new directions. This is a logical direction of investment,” adds Mr. Gusev.

One of the risks in the development of this area may be an increased number of regulatory barriers in the medical industry, notes Auriga machine learning and computer vision expert Dmitry Malyshev.

According to him, a “typical project in the field of AI” in medicine may encounter a number of difficulties when receiving training data from medical organizations, immersion in the complex subject area of ​​certain areas of medicine, with increased requirements for testing and approbation of new methods and with passing certification procedures.

Nikita Korolev