Partners HealthCare www.partners.org and GE Healthcare www.gehealthcae.com recently announced a ten year collaboration to rapidly develop, validate, and strategically integrate deep learning technology across the entire continuum of care.
The collaboration will be through the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Center for Clinical Data Science www.massgeneral.org/imaging/research/researchlab.aspx?id=1759. By working together, co-located multidisciplinary teams with broad access to data, computational infrastructure, and clinical expertise will be provided.
The initial focus will be on developing applications aimed at improving clinician productivity and patient outcomes in diagnostic imaging. Over time, the groups will create new business models for applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to healthcare by developing products for use by medical specialties like molecular pathology, genomics, and population health.
The goal is to implement AI into the patient’s journey from admittance through discharge. Once the deep learning applications are developed and deployed, clinicians and patients will benefit from a variety of tools that can span disease areas, diagnostic modalities, and develop treatment strategies.
Additionally, the teams will co-develop an open platform where Partners HealthCare, GE Healthcare, and a third party developer can rapidly prototype, validate, and share the applications with hospitals and clinics around the world.
For example, a single patient with a spinal injury undergoing an MRI can generate up to 300 images. This means that a doctor may need to review prior scans and notes in a patient’s EMR before making a diagnosis.
In this case, a deep learning application could be leveraged to quickly analyze the data and determine the most critical images for the radiologist to read thereby shortening the time to treat trauma patients
“This is an important moment for medicine” said, David Torchiana, MD, CEO Partners HealthCare. “Clinicians are inundated with data, but by combining the expertise of MGH and BWH along with the innovation existing at GE, this partnership has the resources and vision to accelerate the development and adoption of deep learning technology.”
He adds, “This collaborative effort will empower clinicians with the tools needed to store, analyze, and leverage the flood of information to more effectively deliver care to patients.”