Forming a New Partnership

A new alliance between GE Healthcare www.gehealthcare.com and Roche Diagnostics www.roche.com, is going to develop data driven software by marrying in-vivo and in-vitro diagnostics data with the latest clinical research. The problem is that patient information can be siloed in different departments which can mean that sets of records or even hospitals and their care teams don’t always see the full clinical picture.

The two companies will create applications integrating a wide range or patient information alongside with the latest clinical studies and research. This will enable doctors to diagnose patients earlier and develop personalized treatments that may be more effective. Initially the solutions will focus on oncology and critical care.

“Medicine today is becoming vastly more data driven due to advances in our scientific understanding of disease and human biology, combined with our ability to detect and measure many new parameters,” reports Steve Burnell, PhD, Vice President, Head of Strategy Diagnostics Information Solutions at Roche.

New therapy options in oncology include immune therapies and combination regimens. These regimens require the application of comprehensive diagnostic approaches using both new and established biomarkers to screen, diagnose, and monitor disease. When combined with the increasing availability of big datasets and advanced analytics, it will be possible for a patient to be placed quickly within the context of a broader evidence base.

For example, in the case of a breast cancer patient, the apps running behind the dashboard could combine a woman’s diagnostic images, pathology, and genomic information into one profile. ”By leveraging this combined data set using machine learning and deep learning, it may be possible to reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies that are performed due to suspicious finds in the mammograms and could possibly reduce mastectomies that are performed to combat ductal carcinoma in situ”, said Nadeem Ishaque, Chief Innovation Officer at GE Healthcare Imaging.

For patients receiving critical care in the ICU or ED, data could be obtained from biomarkers, tissue pathology, genomics, and sequencing data. The new combined data set could then be integrated into existing clinician workflows and help physicians identify or even predict infectious diseases before they hit and infect patients.

The cloud based apps and dashboard will help doctors and researchers visualize the data and provide actionable insights from multiple datasets, none of which are visible to the human eye and therefore can’t be synthesized by human cognitive processes.