Nina Kottler, MD, MS on the crucial role economic ROI plays in AI adoption.

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Imaging AI is evolving fast, but radiology leaders’ expectations for their AI technologies might be evolving even faster. In this Imaging Wire Show with Dr. Charlene Liew of SingHealth and Dr. Nina Kottler of Radiology Partners, we explore radiology leaders’ current and future expectations for AI, and the central role platforms play in their AI roadmaps.

Cloud Imaging

AWS Targets Storage and Speed with HealthLake Imaging

AWS took a major step to bolster its cloud value proposition with the launch of Amazon HealthLake Imaging, a new HIPAA-eligible capability that addresses some of cloud imaging’s most common pain points.

Amazon HealthLake Imaging allows healthcare organizations to run multiple applications from a single authoritative copy of an image’s data that’s stored in the cloud, while giving each on-site application customizable metadata-level image access (e.g., patient ID, modality), and returning specially-encoded/compressed images to facilitate faster transfer. As a result…

• Healthcare providers can cut their image storage TCO by 40% by eliminating the storage creep that comes from saving the same images to the cloud multiple times
• Radiologists can retrieve and load imaging data from the cloud with sub-second latencies
• Image viewers and AI algorithms can present or analyze the contents of a DICOM study faster, because they don’t have to load unnecessary image data
• Researchers and developers can create de-identified image copies, without copying pixel data (and having to store that extra data)
• AI development teams can access DICOM metadata in a developer-friendly format

Although AWS already plays a major role in radiology, this is one of very few imaging-targeted launch announcements that we’ve seen from the cloud giant. It also comes one month after Google Cloud similarly made its most public cloud imaging announcement in recent memory. 

• Considering that medical imaging is responsible for roughly 90% of healthcare data, the recent surge in cloud imaging announcements suggests that the cloud leaders are increasing their focus on imaging as a way to add, keep, and grow their healthcare cloud accounts.

The Takeaway

It’s not every day that a storage provider launches a solution specifically intended to cut their clients’ storage costs nearly in half, but this seems like a logical move for AWS, considering that storage costs and performance lag are two of cloud imaging’s biggest challenges. It makes even more sense considering imaging’s role in overall healthcare cloud adoption, where we are in the healthcare cloud landgrab, and the fact that Amazon’s core principals start with “Customer Obsessed.”

Calculating Imaging Standardization’s Value

Enlitic’s Curie|ENDEX software conforms messy metadata to a standard convention, making radiology data searchable and hanging protocols more reliable. And as Enlitic’s new ROI calculator shows, those imaging efficiencies create notable time and cost savings.

Meaningful Innovation in 4D CT

If you’re ready to get more from your interventional suite, tune in to this Imaging Wire Show featuring Canon Medical Systems’ vascular leader, Bill Newsom, exploring the meaningful innovation that went into Canon’s 4D CT technology.

The Wire

• 18F-FDG PET/CT’s Infection Impact: Stanford and Yale University researchers published one of the first studies on whole-body 18F-FDG PET/CT’s value for infection diagnosis and treatment management. Among 61 patients with infections and fevers of unknown origin, 18F-FDG PET/CT had a diagnostic or management impact on 22 patients (36%), and was able to confirm suspected prosthetic endovascular infection among 6 of 16 patients (38%). 

• Cleerly & Heartbeat Health’s Virtual CCTAs: Cleerly unveiled a new partnership with virtual cardiology company Heartbeat Health, enabling early disease identification and virtual management. The partnership allows individuals to proactively obtain a coronary CTA test with Cleerly’s AI-enabled analysis, and then connect virtually with a Heartbeat Health cardiologist to discuss a treatment plan. The alliance comes several months after Heartbeat Health signed a similar virtual diagnostics agreement with echo AI company Caption Health.

• Return-to-Screening Improvements: Cancer centers that participated in the national Return-to-Screening program saw notable increases in post-pandemic cancer screening volumes (breast, colorectal, lung cancer, cervical). Among 786 accredited cancer programs that completed 859 Return-to-Screening quality improvement projects between June and November 2021, 79% of centers returned to pre-pandemic screening volumes and achieved at least 10% screening growth. 

• GE’s Norwegian Contrast Expansion: GE Healthcare announced an $80M investment in its Norwegian Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient facility intended to increase iodinated contrast production by 30%. This comes a month after GE announced a new iodine supply agreement and the opening of its $30M contrast production facility in Ireland, as GE responds to the 2022 contrast shortage and sets out to increase its production by 30M annual doses over the next three years.

• Reassessing The Imaging IT Market: Signify Research cut its 2023-2026 Imaging IT market forecast amid looming economic challenges, but assured that the segment will “weather the economic storm.” The firm still expects strong growth in 2023-2024 (~3.5%/yr vs. ~4.5%/yr in its original forecast) due to upcoming replacement cycles and post-pandemic demand, but now foresees even slower growth in 2025-2026 (~1.75%/yr vs. ~2.75% originally). Given the upcoming challenges, Signify called the 2023-2024 surge an opportunity that informatics vendors “cannot afford to miss.”

• Aidoc’s AD and VO FDAs: Aidoc announced the FDA clearances of its new aortic dissection (AD) and vessel occlusion (VOs) CT triage solutions, giving it an AI market-leading 11 clearances. The VO solution is the first stroke AI tool covering all intracranial LVOs and distal medium VOs (others focus on MCA and ICA occlusions). Aidoc’s new Aortic Solutions tool assesses every scan for acute AD, and further expands Aidoc’s cardiovascular offering (also: PE, DVT, aortic aneurysm, and Us2.ai’s echo AI).

• Hospital EDs at “Breaking Point”: Hospital EDs across the US are at a “breaking point” according to the American College of Emergency Physicians, who wrote a letter to President Joe Biden pleading with the administration to find a solution to ED overcrowding. The letter urged the administration to convene a summit to identify ways to reduce boarding, where admitted patients are held in the ED due to a lack of inpatient beds, which the authors say has progressed to “becoming its own public health emergency.” 

• Sirona & RevealDX’s Next Step: One year after unveiling their partnership, Sirona Medical and RevealDx announced their integration and upcoming launch. RevealDX’s RevealAI-Lung solution (CE-marked, FDA in early 2023) will be integrated into the Sirona Workspace, where it will combine with Sirona’s Nines lung nodule measurement tool to create an end-to-end lung nodule workflow. That’s good timing, because starting in 2023 radiologists who use AI tools that assess lung cancer risk in chest CTs (like RevealAI-Lung) can receive $600-$700 Medicare outpatient reimbursements.

• Density Risk Stratification: New research out of Canada demonstrated the feasibility and impact of incorporating breast tissue density (BTD) into breast cancer risk assessments. Among 131 women, 22 were clinically impacted by incorporating BTD assessments (16.8%), with 9 of the women becoming eligible for a high-risk screening program (w/ supplemental MRI) and 13 made ineligible for the program. 

• CXR AI Screening Performance: A large new prospective multicenter study from Qure.ai and Aarthi Scans & Labs (India’s largest diagnostics provider) highlighted the Qure.ai qXR solution’s accuracy and efficiency for pre-screening CXRs. During 1.5 years, 10 radiologists interpreted 65k CXRs using qXR, finding that it differentiated normal and abnormal CXRs with a 98.9% NPV and a 0.948 average AUC across 15 abnormalities, while reducing radiologist reporting time by 40.6%.

• Moving to Cloud Imaging: Less than 1.5 years after launching its Stratus cloud platform to beta users, Change Healthcare revealed that its hospital customers have already moved more than 10% of their imaging data to the cloud (>6 petabytes), with 45 hospitals going live with Stratus Imaging Archive and 73 institutions adopting Stratus Imaging Analytics.

Imaging AI’s Next Wave

We may be entering a third wave of imaging AI’s rapid evolution, that brings a shift from narrow point solutions to comprehensive multi-finding AI systems. Join this discussion with annalise.ai Chief Medical Officer, Rick Abramson, MD, exploring how this transition could take place, how radiologist and VC perspectives on AI are changing, and how AI might continue to evolve in the future.

Pediatric Hydrocephalus’ Radiation Impact

“We care about how we image these children because we don’t like them to get radiation.” That’s Nationwide Children’s Hospital neurosurgery chief, Jeffrey Leonard, MD, explaining why he endorses monitoring pediatric hydrocephalus patients using the Hyperfine Swoop Portable MR (rather than CT) in this revealing webinar.

The Resource Wire

• Is your MRI fit for the future? See how upgrading to Siemens Healthineers’ BioMatrix scanner can allow you to meet rising demand and improve your MRI workflows without the costs and disruptions of moving to a completely new MRI.

• When Sao Paolo’s Diagnosticos da America SA (DASA, the world’s 4th largest diagnostics company) set out to evaluate Qure.ai’s QXR solution for their pediatric chest X-ray workflows, they leveraged CARPL.ai’s platform to streamline their evaluation. See how it worked.

• See how United Imaging’s fresh approach, vertically integrated structure, and unique “all-in” strategy is raising the bar in medical imaging. 

• With ongoing radiologist shortages and higher rates of burnout, there’s a great need for fast, effective, efficient medical imaging technologies – and those factors are driving 2022’s major medical imaging trends detailed in this Arterys report.

• What if AI could produce echo measurements that are comparable to expert physicians, but with less variability? That’s exactly what this Nature study revealed about Us2.ai’s solution, finding that its measurements had fewer and smaller differences compared to three human experts than when the experts were compared with each other.

• Trying to figure out how your IT resources can handle increased AI adoption? This Blackford paper details how the cloud is helping radiology organizations scale their computing resources to support multiple AI applications or algorithms.

• Pandemic delays, conflicting screening guidelines, and a diverse mix of risk factors may put millions of women at risk of late breast cancer diagnoses. That’s why this editorial by Dr. Amy Patel of Liberty Hospital and Morris Panner of Intelerad emphasizes the need to adopt the right technology and best practices to ensure providers can address this challenge.

• Did you know one quarter of healthcare organizations have experienced a cyber-attack in the last year? This Change Healthcare animation explains how 3rd-party certified cloud-native enterprise imaging can help secure IT infrastructure that might be exposed with re-platformed imaging systems.

• Imaging providers who want to finally #ditchthedisk can now start off with Novarad’s CryptoChart Lite solution, a standard version of CryptoChart built for providers transitioning to imaging sharing.

• Over 9 out of 10 people who should be screened for lung cancer aren’t, and nearly 50% of lung cancer cases are caught in the advanced stages. We know from prostate and breast cancer screening that clear guidelines and increased screening saves lives. But lung cancer screening has been challenging. Riverain strives to make everything about the lungs clearer, so they assembled this resource page for anyone interested in starting or improving their lung screening program.

• Did you know that portable chest X-ray exams are responsible for 69% of patient misidentification errors in radiology? That’s why GE Healthcare’s AMX Navigate portable X-ray system features a handheld barcode reader, allowing technologists to scan a patient’s wristband and automatically match the patient to the worklist.

• Bayer’s cloud-based Calantic Digital Solutions AI platform features a suite of disease-specific AI apps that integrate into radiologist workflows, helping radiology teams scale AI deployment and improve efficiency and quality of care.