GE Healthcare has introduced its Thoracic Care Suite, a collection of eight artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms from Lunit Insight CXR to help alleviate clinical strain due to COVID-19. The AI suite quickly analyzes chest x-ray findings and flags abnormalities to radiologists for review, including pneumonia, which may be indicative of COVID-19 as well as tuberculosis, lung nodules, and other radiological findings.
“The launch of our Thoracic Care Suite is a part of GE Healthcare’s larger effort to help ensure clinicians and partners on the front lines have the equipment they need to quickly diagnose and effectively treat COVID-19 patients,” says Kieran Murphy, President & CEO, GE Healthcare. “The pandemic has proven that data, analytics, AI and connectivity will only become more central to delivering care. For GE Healthcare, that means continuing to advance intelligent health and providing innovative technologies. This new offering is the latest example of how x-ray and AI can uphold the highest standard of patient care amidst the most modern of disease threats.”
As the spread of the virus continues – overwhelming radiologists, technologists, and physicians – clinicians continue to need tools to help manage new cases and complications caused by the virus – including pneumonia and acute respiratory distress – which have further increased pressure on radiologists to quickly read chest x-ray exams.
The Thoracic Care Suite harnesses the power of AI to help alleviate these pressures by automatically analyzing images for the presence of eight abnormal radiologic findings, including suspected tuberculosis and pneumonia findings, which can be indicative of COVID-19. Upon reading the flagged report in picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), radiologists can quickly find the abnormality score for each of the eight possible abnormalities, an image overlay, and a written location description to help expedite diagnosis and treatment.
Thoracic Care Suite provides much needed support to help quickly identify high-risk cases as well as monitor patients showing the progression and regression of mild respiratory symptoms. With 97-99% accuracy rate (Area Under the Curve – AUC), the powerful algorithms behind the AI suite have been trained to detect radiologic findings within seconds. In one study, results showed a 34% reduction in reading time per case .
In addition to detecting pneumonia, Thoracic Care Suite also supports tuberculosis, atelectasis, calcification, cardiomegaly, fibrosis, mediastinal widening, lung nodule, and pleural effusion detection.
Thoracic Care Suite is available to GE Healthcare’s thousands of global fixed, mobile and R&F x-ray customers at point of sale, meaning the technology can more quickly be deployed in market and in hospital without the fear of annual fees – an important consideration if a second wave of COVID-19 were to occur. Furthermore, installation of the technology does not require customers to engage with any enterprise IT projects, helping to lower the barrier for entry in adopting AI.
To provide this technology, GE Healthcare partnered with Lunit, a South Korean medical AI software company that develops AI-powered analysis of lung diseases via chest x-ray images. Founded in 2013, Lunit has been recognized for its advanced, state-of-the-art technology and medical imaging applications in international competitions – including ImageNet, TUPAC, and Camelyon – surpassing top companies like Google, IBM, and Microsoft.
• For more information on GE Healthcare’s Thoracic Care Suite and COVID-19 solutions visit www.gehealthcare.com
