As GE prepares to spin off its healthcare business into a separate entity, the soon-to-be standalone company is forging ahead in its quest to develop a broad range of artificial intelligence tools designed to overhaul and revamp existing hospital practices.
At the Radiological Society of North America’s ongoing annual meeting, GE Healthcare not only unveiled dozens of new digital solutions to improve patient screening, diagnostics, treatment and monitoring but also gave extra attention to several of the AI-powered technologies the company has debuted in recent months.
The newest of these is Critical Care Suite 2.0, an AI platform embedded on a mobile X-ray device to automatically calculate measurements during scans, triage cases and oversee quality controls. The AI algorithms received a landmark FDA clearance just this month, when one of the suite’s AI algorithms became the first OK’d by the agency to help clinicians assess endotracheal tube placements.
GE also highlighted its Allia platform, which acts as an AI-powered assistant throughout image-guided therapy procedures. The system works around clinicians to automatically position a laser-guided robotic arm and uses augmented reality to enhance its guidance throughout a procedure. It also keeps track of each clinician’s technological preferences, allowing the imaging suite to be immediately reset and customized to their needs each time they enter.
Despite already boasting a broad slate of AI systems and devices, GE is also continuing to develop new tools that use AI and machine learning to accelerate diagnostics and treatment.
One new project announced last week will see GE partnering with Optellum to improve the early detection of lung cancer. Optellum has developed the Virtual Nodule Clinic, which uses AI to predict the probability that an identified lung nodule is malignant, simultaneously eliminating unnecessary biopsies for benign nodules and speeding up treatment for cancerous ones.
Through their collaboration, GE will work with Optellum to integrate the FDA-cleared system into GE’s line of imaging tools, including CT scanners and picture archiving and communication systems, or PACS, as well as its own Edison AI platform.
“The integration of imaging and medical device data from the Edison platform with AI-enabled solutions like the one offered by the Optellum Virtual Nodule Clinic has the potential to streamline clinician workflows and advance our goal of making precision healthcare—taking the right action at the right time for every patient, at scale—as widely accessible as possible,” said Ben Newton, Ph.D., GE Healthcare’s general manager of oncology solutions.
Meanwhile, in another partnership announced this week, GE will join forces with the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals to develop a machine-learning-based tool that will compile cancer patients’ data into one centralized location for easier access by their care teams.
The solution will gather clinical, imaging and genomic data in a single interface that will be made available to oncologists, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists and more, who can then use the data to collaborate on drafting the most effective treatment plan possible for each patient and keeping a closer eye on their progress throughout the plan.
To start, the partners will design the system around collecting data for ovarian cancer patients at Cambridge’s hospitals. From there, it’ll be expanded to ovarian cancer patients across the U.K. and beyond, after which, if it proves successful, GE and Cambridge plan to make it available for breast and kidney cancer patients.
