Viz.ai Announces Advisory Board Members, Signaling Leadership in Stroke Care Innovation

Viz.ai, a clinician-focused artificial intelligence healthcare company, has announced the members of its advisory board. The six advisors represent expertise in neurovascular care, medical imaging, workflow and economic policy. The members include Raul Nogueira, M.D.; Jeffrey Saver, M.D.; Blaise Baxter, M.D.; Michael Froehler, M.D., Ph.D.; Niall Brennan, M.P.P.; and Amy Vreeland, M.S.

The advisory board will help guide Viz.ai’s visionary mission to enable direct-to-intervention healthcare, a new category of healthcare powered by advanced artificial intelligence, which ensures the right patient is treated by the right doctor at the right time.
 
Viz.ai’s President and CEO Dr. Chris Mansi said, “Viz.ai is dedicated to leveraging artificial intelligence to streamline stroke care through automated disease identification and intelligent stroke workflow. Our board of advisors brings leadership and extensive experience to the direct-to-intervention category.”

Viz.ai’s advisory board consists of six leaders who will each serve a two-year term. They are:
 
Raul Nogueira, the outgoing president and one of the founding members of the Society of Vascular and Interventional Neurology (SVIN), and an internationally acclaimed interventional neurologist at Grady Memorial Hospital, where he serves as the director of the Neurovascular Division. He is a pioneer in the neurovascular field, most recently as the co-principal investigator of the ground-breaking DAWN trial, the first trial to provide compelling evidence for treating late window and wake-up stroke patients with mechanical thrombectomy. He has over 20 years of experience in neurovascular research and clinical care.
 
Jeffrey Saver, a distinguished vascular neurologist and researcher at UCLA Medical Center, where he has been the director of the UCLA Stroke Center since its inception. He has over 30 years of experience in neurovascular research and clinical care. Saver has been a lead investigator of more than 50 multicenter clinical research studies and has published more than 530 original articles in leading journals. His research focuses on stroke prevention, diagnosis and acute treatment. Saver’s achievements were recently honored by the American Heart Association, and his work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Stroke Association.
 
Blaise Baxter, the president of the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery (SNIS) and a world-renowned interventional neuroradiologist. He chairs the Department of Radiology at Erlanger Hospital. Baxter has over 30 years of experience in the neurovascular space. He helped develop the Southeast Regional Stroke Center at Erlanger Hospital, one of the highest volume stroke centers in the United States. He has been involved in the design of several endovascular devices and techniques, and his research in stroke has been published in several high-impact journals including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and Stroke.
 
Michael Froehler, a neurointerventionalist and vascular neurologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He has 15 years of experience in neurovascular research and clinical care. Froehler maintains an active clinical and translational research program. He serves as the principal investigator for the Regional Coordinating Center of StrokeNet, a national network for clinical research in cerebrovascular disease sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Froehler is considered a leader in stroke systems of care, with multiple publications related to delivering acute stroke treatment.
 
Niall Brennan, the president of the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) and former chief data officer at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He has over 20 years of experience in healthcare and economic policy and is a nationally recognized expert in the use of healthcare data to enable and accelerate health system change. He has published widely in leading academic journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs. He has also worked at the Brookings Institution, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the Congressional Budget Office, the Urban Institute and Price WaterhouseCoopers.
 
Amy Vreeland, the cofounder of lifeIMAGE, a medical image network that empowers hospitals, physicians and patients to share diagnostic imaging information via a mobile platform. She is also the founder of Imaging Strategies, a company providing advisory services to health systems and healthcare information technology (HIT) companies. Prior to lifeIMAGE and Imaging Strategies, she was vice president of Client Services at AMICAS (subsequently acquired by Merge), which was twice ranked “Best in KLAS” under her leadership. She has over 25 years of entrepreneurial and leadership experience in HIT and medical imaging.

Stroke is a leading cause of permanent disability, death and healthcare costs. In the United States, someone has a stroke every 40 seconds and someone dies from a stroke every four minutes. Each year, nearly 800,000 people experience a new stroke costing the U.S. health system more than $72 billion in direct stroke-related costs.¹
 
Viz.ai is a direct-to-intervention healthcare company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning algorithms to analyze medical data and improve medical workflow. Direct-to-intervention care leverages the advanced power of AI to communicate time-sensitive information about patients straight to a specialist who can intervene and treat. Viz.ai removes much of the friction in today’s stroke workflow by providing the right information to the right doctor at the right time. Viz.ai is based in San Francisco, Calif., and Tel Aviv, Israel, and is financially backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s venture capital (VC) firm, Innovation Endeavors, and by DHVC. Viz.ai is the first company to offer an artificial intelligence direct-to-intervention system in Europe and to be given CE Mark approval for a device in this category of care.
 
Reference
1. According to the American Stroke Association