In the wake of launching a new, integrated version of its AI-based mammography software, Halifax’s Densitas has inked deals with the governments of New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Nova Scotia to roll out its technology in provincial hospitals and clinics.

The intelliMammo platform consolidates three previous software offerings from Densitas that measured patients’ breast density, assessed future cancer risks and offered mammogram image-quality monitoring for quality-control purposes. Breast density is one indicator of the likelihood that someone will develop cancer, and also makes mammography more difficult by concealing lumps.

In a statement last week, the company said the technology will soon be used by the Horizon Health Network and Vitalité Health Network in New Brunswick, Health PEI on Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia Health and IWK Health in Nova Scotia.

The news comes as Densitas CEO Mo Abdolell says the company has bounced back from a pandemic-related slowdown in sales, particularly in the key United States market, and is now expanding rapidly.

“Without women going in for procedures, there was just less volume, so there was a big impact on mammography screenings and the businesses related to that,” he said in an interview. “The U.S. market seems to be bouncing back fairly quickly -- maybe because of the rapid push out of the vaccines -- and there’s a lot of activity in the United States right now.”

Abdolell said Densitas has seen an increase both in the number of sales inquiries it receives and the number of sales it closes.

To handle the additional workload, the company has hired six new employees in the past six months, for a total staff of about 16, or 18 counting part-time workers. And more hires are on the horizon.

The intelliMammo software runs as a web-based application, but the data is stored locally and the AI system runs on hospital or clinic computers – not in the cloud.

Abdolell said Densitas’s customers have preferred this approach because of the strict data-privacy laws that govern medical service providers in most jurisdictions. Densitas’s AI system is capable of operating in the cloud, but so far, no customers have asked for that feature.

“We know that there are going to be some customers that will ask for that,” said Abdolell. “But it really depends on their data infrastructure and how comfortable they are to push their data to the cloud.”

One of the key selling points of intelliMammo, he added, is that it allows healthcare providers to aggregate all of their mammogram records and related work in a single location, which dramatically simplifies regulatory compliance.

“In terms of compliance and making sure that when the inspector comes in, you’re up to standard, you have to implement continual quality assurance programming,” he said. “If everything is on paper and all over the place, that’s very difficult to do, and time consuming, and prone to errors. With our system, they can maintain compliance more easily when the inspectors come in.”