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Bayer, Google Aim To Fast Track Development of AI-Powered Radiology Apps
Life sciences giant Bayer this week announced a new partnership with Google to help the development of AI-powered applications specifically for radiologists.
Announced on Tuesday as part of Google's Cloud Next conference, the collaboration will result in what Bayer calls an "innovation platform" that's built on Google's massive cloud and leveraging its healthcare AI solutions like Vertex AI. The platform will give healthcare-focused developers a "cloud-native pipeline from product idea to launch," according to the announcement.
At least at the outset, the platform is meant to help radiologists specifically. Google argued that radiologists are stretched very thin because of the sheer volume of medical imaging data that they have to manage, process and analyze for their patients. Medical imaging accounts for the vast majority of all healthcare data, according to Google, with billons scanned annually.
"Many new supportive AI tools need to be developed and maintained to handle and analyze this enormous amount of data efficiently," said Google, but application development is often hindered by various scalability, integration, data processing and compliance challenges unique to healthcare.
To address these problems, Bayer's platform will have three tenets, according to the announcement:
- Analyze and experiment: The users will be able to uncover insights with AI-powered data analysis, and help design breakthrough healthcare solutions by accessing a data ecosystem, as well as using intelligent search and data preparation capabilities. In addition, users will have the ability to explore and extract information from regulations and scientific papers, all within a collaboration platform with leading data security capabilities.
- Build and validate: Developers will also be able to scale and engineer solutions using gen AI assistance for ideation, development, validation, and lifecycle management; generate documents in alignment with healthcare requirements to aid in gaining regulatory approval; leverage medical imaging core lab services from Bayer for clinical performance evaluation.
- Launch and monitor: Healthcare and life science companies will be able to deploy gen AI medical solutions standardized for flexible integration across compatible healthcare systems; and analyze field data for insights, bias detection, and continuous improvement.
The platform is expected to see daylight as a preview release sometime this year in the United States and Europe.
"Radiologists and other clinicians face burnout due to the sheer volume of work they face everyday. Gen AI can help tackle repetitive tasks and provide insights into massive data sets, saving valuable time and helping to positively impact patient outcomes," said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Added Nelson Ambrogio, Bayer's president of radiology, "[O]ur joint efforts will help organizations in the healthcare and life science industry transform the growing amounts of data into valuable and impactful insights, saving radiologists time and helping them optimize their important work for the benefit of patients."