Collaborations empower the healthcare industry
to create a vast array of medical imaging copilot applications that
will help enhance radiologists' experiences
and contribute to better patient outcomes
REDMOND,
Wash., July 24, 2024 /PRNewswire/
-- Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced collaborations with
leading academic medical systems Mass General Brigham and the
University of Wisconsin School of
Medicine and Public Health along with its partnering health
system, UW Health, to accelerate solving some of the biggest
challenges in radiology and further advance AI in medical imaging
to drive clinician efficiency and enable better health outcomes.
The collaborations will foster research and innovation tied to the
advancement of high-performing multimodal AI foundation models that
empower the entire radiology ecosystem to build on top of the
secure Microsoft Azure AI platform and extend the Nuance (a
Microsoft company) suite of radiology applications, delivering a
wide array of high-value medical imaging copilot applications.
Medical imaging plays a crucial role in healthcare. Health
systems spend an estimated $65
billion each year on imaging,1 and approximately
80% of all hospital and health system visits include at least one
imaging exam related to more than 23,000 conditions.2
Faced with challenges that the overall healthcare industry grapples
with, including physician burnout and staffing shortages,
healthcare organizations are looking to generative AI to help
reduce workloads, enhance workflow efficiencies, and improve the
accuracy and consistency of medical image analysis for care
delivery, clinical trials recruitment and drug discovery.
Generative AI in radiology also may help enhance patient
experiences by reducing wait times for imaging results, further
opening up access to care and improving the quality of care.
With the right multimodal data-enriched medical imaging
foundation models, Microsoft and its partners will explore how
advanced algorithms and applications can help radiologists and
other clinicians interpret medical images, as well as assist with
report generation, disease classification and structured data
analysis.
Microsoft has long been focused on the potential of providing
high-performing first- and third-party advanced foundation models
and copilot experiences across the ecosystem to empower everyone on
the planet to achieve more. Additionally, Microsoft has been an
innovator in the space of medical imaging research and biomedical
natural language processing, collaborating with experts in medicine
to democratize AI and empower researchers, hospitals, life science
organizations and healthcare providers to develop new models and
systems.
Through these collaborations, researchers and clinicians at Mass
General Brigham, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and UW
Health will work with Microsoft to further advance state-of-the-art
multimodal foundation models. The organizations will collaborate on
the development, testing and validation of the latest breakthrough
technology, deploying real-world use cases into clinical
workflows3 including via Nuance's PowerScribe radiology
reporting platform, used by the majority of radiologists in the
U.S., and the Nuance Precision Imaging Network, which offers a
single point of access to automate and scale use of third-party
medical imaging AI models for a range of modalities and
specialties.
"Generative AI has transformative potential to overcome
traditional barriers in AI product development and to accelerate
the impact of these technologies on clinical care. As healthcare
leaders, we need to carefully and responsibly develop and evaluate
such tools to ensure high-quality care is in no way compromised,"
said Keith J. Dreyer, D.O., Ph.D.,
chief data science officer and chief imaging officer at Mass
General Brigham and leader of the Mass General Brigham AI business.
"Foundation models fine-tuned on Mass General Brigham's vast
multimodal longitudinal data assets can enable a shorter
development cycle of AI/ML-based software as a medical device and
other clinical applications, for example, to automate the
segmentation of organs and abnormalities in medical imaging and
increase radiologists' efficiency and consistency."
"Our institutions have a reputation for embracing technical
innovations as opportunities to lead the transformation of our
field with new scientific discovery and improvement in clinical
care," said Scott Reeder, M.D.,
Ph.D., chair of the Department of Radiology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and
Public Health, and radiologist at UW Health. "We are excited to
collaborate with Microsoft on the development, validation and
thoughtful clinical investigation of generative AI in the medical
imaging space. Our focus is to bridge the gap within medical
imaging from innovation to patient care in ways that improve
outcomes and make innovative care more accessible."
"We are proud to announce our expanded collaborations with
leading institutions like Mass General Brigham and UW. Along with
other industry partners, our joint efforts aim to leverage the
power of imaging foundation models to improve experiences and
workflow efficiency across the radiology ecosystem in a way
that is reliable, transparent and secure," said Peter Durlach, corporate vice president,
Microsoft Health and Life Sciences. "Together, we are not only
advancing medical imaging, but also helping deliver more accessible
and better-quality patient care in a very resource-constrained
environment."
The industry continues to see rapid advancements in generative
AI in radiology and other imaging specialties. With these advances
comes an even greater responsibility to prioritize patient privacy
and build systems guided by Microsoft's Responsible AI principles.
In addition to building our own AI systems responsibly and in ways
that warrant people's trust, we empower our customers with tools
and features to do the same. We invest in our customers'
responsible AI goals in three ways:
- We stand behind our customers' deployment and use of AI through
our AI Customer Commitments.
- We build responsible AI tools for our customers to use in
developing their own AI applications responsibly.
- We provide transparency documentation to customers to provide
important information about our AI platforms and applications.
The collaborations with Mass General Brigham, UW and many other
industry partners aim to accelerate the development of
high-performing foundation models for medical imaging that support
and enable the greater healthcare ecosystem in a way that adheres
to Microsoft's responsible AI principles. Read more in our 2024
Responsible AI Transparency Report.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) creates platforms and tools
powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the
evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is
committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly,
with a mission to empower every person and every organization on
the planet to achieve more.
1 JAMA. 2012;307(22):2400-2409.
doi:10.1001/jama.2012.5960
2 Healthcare, Definitive. "Healthcare Analytics
& Provider Data | Definitive Healthcare." Definitive Healthcare
– Database of Hospitals & Healthcare Providers,
www.definitivehc.com
3 Subject to appropriate regulatory
approvals
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.