General Electric already has a foothold in the medical field producing products that range from clinical consumable to MRI machines to ventilators. With companies like IBM and Google, relative newcomers to healthcare, developing artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for use in a healthcare, GE is leveraging their experience in healthcare to try to leap ahead of these competitors. We saw this recently with GE’s partnership with the University of California San Francisco and, now, Boston Children’s Hospital.
At the annual meeting of Radiological Society of North America last month, GE Healthcare and Boston Children’s Hospital announced a joint venture utilizing the expertise of the clinicians at the hospital and GE’s artificial intelligence technology. Initially, the deep-learning medical app will focus on brain scans, but according to GE’s chief digital officer, they hope to have a variety of apps for many diseases available by 2020.
The first result their collaboration is a “decision-support platform” meant to improve the accuracy of pediatric brain scans. It’s especially important to be as accurate as possible with children because their brains change at a rapid rate and pediatric radiologists are few and far between. Boston Children’s Hospital performs around 1,000 scans on children a day, so a deep-learning system that reviews thousands of previous scans and can help pinpoint the exact diagnosis is invaluable.
Richard Robertson, MD the radiologist-in-chief at Boston Children’s Hospital explains how:
Since most pediatric imaging is not performed in children’s hospitals by specialists, this new digital tool, once available, will provide non-specialists with access to knowledge and expertise to help effectively diagnose children. We believe that by providing decision support at the time of interpretation, we can improve both the confidence and performance of the interpreting radiologist.
ON the heals of their collaboration with UCSF, this partnership is another example of GE leveraging their specific expertise in medical imaging to give them a unique foothold in the growing healthcare artificial intelligence space. Unlike others who may have to bring in experts who understand clinical problems & available data, GE already knows how these scans are acquired and the way the data is stored. Working with a high volume customer like Boston Children’s, who additionally bring the expertise of clinical context and imaging expertise, to develop an AI-based tool to support pediatric imaging could make a big difference in places that lack a similar depth of expertise.
Source: Press Release
