GE HealthCare Announces AI Innovation Lab Showcasing Five New Research Projects
October 21 2024 - 12:10PM
Business Wire
- Innovations include Health Companion research project powered
by agentic AI
- Additional early innovations explore pressing care needs,
including identifying new ways to detect breast cancer and
improving quality of care for moms and babies
GE HealthCare (Nasdaq: GEHC) today announced a new AI Innovation
Lab, an initiative designed to accelerate early-concept AI
innovations within the company. These projects are one part of GE
HealthCare’s broader AI and digital strategy, which is focused on
integrating AI into medical devices, building AI applications that
enhance decision-making across the care journey and disease states,
and using AI to support better outcomes and operational
efficiencies system-wide. The company’s investment in cloud
technology underpins this strategy, providing the computing power
to drive the development of AI at scale.
"The AI Innovation Lab lifts the curtain on the work we are
undertaking at the vanguard of healthcare innovation. At GE
HealthCare, we're not just developing technology—we're striving to
break new ground by exploring novel ways that AI could enable
healthcare. For example, through projects like Health Companion, we
are evaluating ways to apply agentic AI in order to bring the
clinical knowledge and problem-solving insights of a
multi-disciplinary medical team to clinicians’ fingertips and help
them take action,” said Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, GE HealthCare's Global
Chief Science and Technology Officer. “The pioneering projects
we’re showcasing today are just some of the innovations we have
underway, enabled by our AI and cloud computing capabilities. We
will continue to gather feedback from our customers as we find ways
to help them apply AI to their health data and convert information
into actionable, care-enhancing strategies.”
GE HealthCare’s AI and cloud-related research and development
efforts are focused on redefining the day-to-day experience of
clinicians by creating new concepts to enhance the accuracy of
diagnostics, reduce administrative burdens, and ensure that every
patient receives the most informed, personalized care possible.
Examples of these concept projects:
- Bringing the knowledge of a
multi-disciplinary team to clinicians’ fingertips with agentic
AI: The Health Companion project explores whether an
agentic AI approach driven by multiple agents, each an expert in a
particular area (i.e., genomics, radiology, pathology, etc.), could
help physicians streamline their clinical decision-making and
deliver more personalized care. The project’s vision is for these
agents to collaborate and analyze multi-modal data in order to
proactively generate treatment plan recommendations, continuously
adapting based on new information. For example, GE HealthCare is
exploring whether multi-agentic AI could understand the difference
between an expected symptom as a function of treatment, and the
same symptom as a signal of disease progression, such as cancer
spread with the goal to alert the care team as appropriate with
suggested next steps. Health Companion aims to provide the
collaboration and discussion similar to a multi-disciplinary care
team that is made up of specialized clinicians. This project is
being built to incorporate safety and explainability
principles.
- Using AI to better predict triple
negative breast cancer recurrence: GE HealthCare is
supporting the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University on
research focused on the early prediction of triple negative breast
cancer recurrence. Triple negative breast cancer is the most
aggressive breast cancer subtype, however, there is a shortage of
tools to predict its recurrence. Today, as many as 50% of patients
diagnosed with early-stage triple negative breast cancer (stages I
to III) experience recurrence.i The goal of this research is to use
deep learning to evaluate multi-modal data including genomics and
pathology information to investigate if AI can better predict the
likelihood of recurrence, and help the care team inform a treatment
plan and monitoring schedule. This research is being funded by a
grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH Grant#
1R01CA281932-01A1). Dr. Sunil Badve from Emory University is the
Principal Investigator (PI), and Dr. Soumya Ghose is the Co-PI from
GE HealthCare for this project.
- Innovating solutions to enhance care
for moms and babies: Preventable risks associated with
childbirth are one of the most pressing health issues facing women
today. GE HealthCare is working directly with health systems and
their care teams to develop solutions that help address this
challenge. For example, GE HealthCare is working on a care
companion initiative that is investigating how generative AI could
minimize the effort spent searching through data and seeking best
practices. Powered by a large language model, this initiative
intends to further explore how to make it easy for care teams to
quickly find information about standard care protocols and clinical
definitions and generate patient summarizations using historical
and current multi-modal data for potential use in handoffs and care
transitions.
- Researching multi-modal X-ray
foundation model: GE HealthCare is working on a research
project to create a full-body foundation model, built on a dataset
of 1.2 million anonymized PHI-free X-ray images from diverse
regions across the body. This model shows great potential, and is
yielding promising early internal benchmark testing on key tasks
including segmentation, classification, and visual localization.
The project is also experimenting with having the model automate
medical report generation and interpret images into text to
accelerate the workflow for radiologists, with the aim to help
alleviate care teams’ administrative burdens. The goal of GE
HealthCare’s research in this area is to provide practical value by
reducing the cognitive burden to healthcare professionals seeking
efficient and reliable tools for diagnostics. The model is being
developed as a result of GE HealthCare’s strategic collaboration
with Amazon Web Services.
- Helping radiologists scale mammography
screenings: Approximately 90% of screening mammograms in
the U.S. are normal, yet there is no efficient way for radiologists
to quickly separate the clearly normal scans from potentially
suspicious ones.ii GE HealthCare is developing this cloud-based AI
concept to explore how foundation models can help clinicians
quickly identify normal breast screening exams, allowing
radiologists to focus more of their time on suspicious cases. As
countries grapple with a radiologist shortage, GE HealthCare aims
to work with strategic and clinical collaborators to make advances
in this space to help enhance accuracy, scale screenings, and
improve access to this critical type of preventive care
globally.
GE HealthCare is working on AI-enabled innovations that run the
gamut in terms of maturity and market-readiness. For example, GE
HealthCare has submitted a 510(k) with the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) requesting clearance of a new solution to
address the needs of clinicians in providing care for moms and
babies. This AI-powered fetal heart rate interpretation feature
(FHR AI, FDA 510(k)-submitted)iii applies deep learning to waveform
data to analyze fetal heart rate. This feature is designed to
identify events such as accelerations and decelerations of fetal
heart rates to help care teams quickly understand the baby’s
health, improving what is currently a highly manual and subjective
task.
These projects showcase the groundbreaking work underway at GE
HealthCare, a company that applies a 125-year legacy of innovation
with the energy of a start-up as it works to help solve the
healthcare industry’s most pressing challenges. GE HealthCare has
been investing in AI for years and has topped an FDA list of
AI-enabled device authorizations for three years in a row with 80
authorizations.iv
To learn more about these projects, visit GE HealthCare in the
AI Pavilion at booth #3816 at HLTH 2024 in Las Vegas, NV from
October 20-23 or visit https://www.gehealthcare.com.
About GE HealthCare Technologies Inc.
GE HealthCare is a leading global medical technology,
pharmaceutical diagnostics, and digital solutions innovator,
dedicated to providing integrated solutions, services, and data
analytics to make hospitals more efficient, clinicians more
effective, therapies more precise, and patients healthier and
happier. Serving patients and providers for more than 125 years, GE
HealthCare is advancing personalized, connected, and compassionate
care, while simplifying the patient’s journey across the care
pathway. Together our Imaging, Ultrasound, Patient Care Solutions,
and Pharmaceutical Diagnostics businesses help improve patient care
from diagnosis, to therapy, to monitoring. We are a $19.6 billion
business with approximately 51,000 colleagues working to create a
world where healthcare has no limits.
Follow us on LinkedIn, X , Facebook, Instagram, and Insights for
the latest news, or visit our website https://www.gehealthcare.com/
for more information.
i National Institutes of Health, “Early prediction of lethal
phenotypes in triple negative breast cancer using multiscale,
multi-modality platforms,”
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10883284. ii “Breast
Cancer Screening (PDQ®)–Health Professional Version,” March 28,
2024, https://www.cancer.gov/types/breast/hp/breast-screening-pdq.
iii The FHR AI 510(k) has been submitted to the FDA and is not
currently available for sale in the United States. iv U.S. Food and
Drug Administration, “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
(AI/ML)-Enabled Medical Devices,” August 7, 2024,
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-aiml-enabled-medical-devices.
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