Mass General Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, along with their partner health system, UW Health, are working with Microsoft to accelerate the use of AI in medical imaging.
The collaborations will foster research into advancing high-performance, multimodal AI foundation models that empower the entire radiology ecosystem to build on the Microsoft Azure AI platform and extend the Nuance Radiology Application Suite to create a variety of medical imaging copilot applications.
Healthcare organizations, facing staff shortages and physician burnout, are turning to generative AI to reduce workloads, improve workflow efficiency, and enhance the accuracy and consistency of medical image analysis for care delivery, clinical trial recruitment, and drug discovery. Generative AI in radiology can also help improve patient experiences by reducing wait times for imaging results, further opening access to care and improving quality of care, Microsoft notes.
Researchers and clinicians from Mass General Brigham, the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and UW Health will collaborate to develop, test, and validate the latest innovative technology, implementing real-world use cases into clinical workflows, including through 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 the use of third-party medical imaging AI models for a variety of modalities and specialties.
“Generative AI has transformative potential to overcome traditional barriers to AI product development and accelerate the impact of these technologies on clinical care. As healthcare leaders, we must carefully and responsibly develop and evaluate such tools to ensure that high-quality care is not compromised in any way,” said Keith J. Dreyer, DO, Ph.D., chief data science officer and chief imaging officer at Mass General Brigham and leader of Mass General Brigham’s AI business, in a statement. “Core models honed on Mass General Brigham’s vast multimodal longitudinal data assets can enable a shorter development cycle of AI/ML-based software such as medical device and other clinical applications — for example, to automate organ and anomaly segmentation in medical images 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 discoveries and improvements in clinical care,” Scott Reeder, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and a radiologist at UW Health, said in a statement. “We are excited to collaborate with Microsoft on the development, validation, and thoughtful clinical research of generative AI in medical imaging. Our goal is to bridge the gap in medical imaging from innovation to patient care in ways that improve outcomes and make innovative care more accessible.”
