GE Healthcare Launches Program to Ease AI Adoption for Medical Providers

GE Healthcare has launched the Edison Developer Program to accelerate the adoption and impact of intelligent applications and developer services across health systems. The program is based on Edison, GE Healthcare’s secure intelligence platform, and helps healthcare providers gain easier access to market-ready algorithms and applications by directly integrating these technologies into existing workflows.
 
For developers, the Edison Developer Program offers a rich set of healthcare services to help accelerate their ability to build innovations that improve operational and clinical outcomes—and also gives them access to scale and the ability to deploy applications across GE Healthcare’s customer base. This program expands the existing Edison ecosystem of researchers, technology providers and academic institutions who develop, manage, secure and distribute advanced applications, services and AI algorithms to drive real healthcare outcomes.
 
GE Healthcare also unveiled several new, Edison-powered technologies, including smart devices and intelligent applications, across a variety of clinical areas. These new solutions are designed to make data, insights and clinical context more accessible and actionable across the health system, creating new value for providers and patients—from reducing costs and complexity to increasing the speed and accuracy of diagnosis.
 
“We introduced Edison just one year ago at RSNA to help health providers take advantage of data in new and significant ways,” said Kieran Murphy, president and CEO, GE Healthcare. “With the introduction of the Edison Developer Program, and a suite of new intelligent applications and smart devices powered by Edison, we are building on that promise as we continue to work with partners to realize our collective goal of advancing the future of health.”
 
New Edison Developer Program to Accelerate AI Integration, Advance Outcomes
Investment in healthcare startups is exploding¹ but implementing new innovations effectively can be cumbersome and complex, slowing adoption. For instance, deploying a one-off clinical AI application is currently a manual and disjointed process. Clinicians are looking for a single solution that can span multiple modalities and seamlessly integrate applications or AI algorithms directly into their existing workflows to harness the power of these technologies.²
 
The Edison Developer Program addresses these needs directly by bringing market-ready AI applications to the Edison platform, integrating them into existing GE Healthcare offerings—on medical devices, in the cloud or at the edge of the network. This deep integration makes it easier for AI and analytics innovators to build, deploy and distribute their offerings. It breaks down barriers to adoption for clinicians, ultimately reducing costs and improving the value of new solutions.
 
GE Healthcare is actively working with a range of AI and analytics innovators—such as Arterys, iCAD, Koios Medical, MaxQ AI and Volpara—to deliver outcomes for healthcare systems via Edison. For example, Koios Medical built and deployed Breast Assistant, powered by Koios DS, an embedded application designed to automatically provide an AI-based quantitative risk assessment that aligns to a BI-RADS category, delivering results in two seconds or less and providing decision support for the clinician. Together, Koios and GE Healthcare integrated their solution into the LOGIQ E10 ultrasound system. Also as part of the Edison Developer Program, GE Healthcare recently launched two initiatives in India and China aimed at growing the regional ecosystem and accelerating availability of local solutions.
 
“The opportunities for healthcare with a truly intelligent connected digital enterprise are significant, but no one organization can get there alone,” said Amit Phadnis, chief digital officer, GE Healthcare. “The Edison Developer Program is unique in its deep technology integration and scaling through the workflow, opening the door to faster adoption by health systems. Bringing together leading technology providers, developers and academic institutions under a single, connected ecosystem will help our customers simplify and optimize data aggregation and orchestration of clinical and operational applications in ways that have the potential to create real impact from the bottom line to better patient outcomes.”
 
The Edison Developer Program exposes a number of potential capabilities of the Edison platform, including secure device connectivity, data aggregation for clinical context, advanced visualization, workflow and AI orchestration, in addition to a rich set of AI capabilities for data traceability, curation, annotation, model training and inferencing. This set of services will reduce the complexity of developing and integrating AI and data-based healthcare applications in clinical workflows. Program members are selected and vetted based on rigorous clinical and technical evaluations as well as regulatory clearance to ensure confidence and security of solutions offered through the Edison platform.
 
Expanded Partner Network to Extend Rapidly Growing Edison Ecosystem
These AI and analytics startups add to a rapidly growing Edison ecosystem of prominent academic institutions, technology providers and medtech companies, including:

• Partners HealthCare and GE Healthcare are working together to improve the patient journey through co-development and integration of deep learning technology across the entire continuum of care under the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Clinical Data Science. The collaboration currently includes 15 active projects underway within areas such as women’s health, cardiology, oncology, hospital operations, and emergency medicine, and relevant imaging modalities such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR) and ultrasound (US).
• The Saint-Joseph Hospital Foundation in Paris and GE Healthcare are creating a research and development laboratory designed to further the benefits of digital technologies across the healthcare journey, including the use of data and AI to optimize operating theatres and monitor the impact of contrast media
• Intel and GE Healthcare have integrated the open source Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit software in the Edison platform for inference acceleration across modalities from edge to cloud. This has resulted in breakthrough performance in Artificial Intelligence Prescription (AIR x), an automated workflow tool designed to accelerate and optimize MR brain scanning, and the Critical Care Suite pneumothorax detection algorithm running on GE Healthcare’s Optima* XR240amx mobile X-ray system, all powered by Intel processors.

 
New Edison Devices, Applications to Improve Efficiencies, Clinical Diagnosis
Additionally, GE Healthcare unveiled a number of new Edison-powered smart devices and intelligent applications designed to help healthcare providers simplify workflows and increase efficiencies while also improving patient comfort and advancing clinical outcomes. These offerings bring together GE Healthcare’s unique capabilities across both imaging devices and software to help health systems more quickly and seamlessly deploy technologies across their care environments.
 
Edison Open AI Orchestrator: Designed to orchestrate AI at scale for imaging workflows, the new Edison Open AI Orchestrator simplifies the implementation, deployment, support and scaling of multiple AI applications including from partners iCAD and MaxQ AI. Designed to seamlessly integrate clinical applications into the radiology PACS reading workflow, this offering reduces the complexity of multiple systems and algorithms working together that could lead to error and risk if implemented incorrectly.
 
LOGIQ E10: This next-generation radiology ultrasound system integrates AI, advanced tools and enhanced workflow capabilities to enable clinicians to scan, diagnose and treat a wide range of patients across a broad spectrum of conditions. One of its newest applications, Breast Assistant, powered by Koios DS, automatically provides an AI-based quantitative risk assessment that aligns to a BI-RADS category. The results are available in two seconds or less, providing decision support for the clinician and helping improve consistency across the department.
 
New Revolution family CT scanner: This powerful, high performing and reliable CT simplifies every step of the CT workflow. Powered by AI, the new Revolution family CT scanner uses real-time depth sensing technology to generate a 3D model of a patient’s body to pinpoint the center of the scan range and automatically align it to the isocenter of the bore. Altogether, it is designed to simplify, streamline and automate the entire CT experience.
 
AIR x: An Edison application, this AI-based, automated workflow tool for MRI brain scanning increases consistency and productivity by providing automated slice prescriptions to help reduce previously redundant, manual steps. AIR x produces images that have less variability between technologists and between scans, to lower the chances for a patient to be recalled due to incorrect slice placement. An increase in consistency is particularly important when doing longitudinal assessments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and Multiple Sclerosis. Technologists can set up exams five times faster and perform four times fewer mouse clicks using deep learning with AIR x.
 
The Edison platform helps GE Healthcare and select strategic partners design, develop, manage, secure and distribute applications and AI algorithms quickly. These new Edison-enabled devices and applications support GE Healthcare’s goal of advancing the future of health and continue the growing strength of the Edison ecosystem. 
 
*510(k) pending at FDA. Not available for sale in the United States.
 
GE Healthcare is the $19.8 billion healthcare business of GE. As a provider of medical imaging, monitoring, biomanufacturing, and cell and gene therapy technologies, GE Healthcare enables precision health in diagnostics, therapeutics and monitoring through intelligent devices, data analytics, applications and services. With over 100 years of experience in the healthcare industry and more than 50,000 employees globally, the company helps improve outcomes more efficiently for patients, healthcare providers, researchers and life sciences companies around the world.

References 
¹ Signify Funding Analysis of Companies Developing Machine Learning Solutions for Medical Imaging Jan 31,2019
² Quantitative Market Research, MarketVision Research, PACS AI, VNA AI, and AI Workflow, 2019; AI Clinical Apps Research Quantitative Market Research, MarketVision Research, MVR Project: 18-0473, 2018.