GE HealthCare launched a new AI suite this week at RSNA 2023, the annual radiology and medical imaging conference in Chicago. The new product, called the MyBreastAI suite, is designed to simplify radiologists’ workflows and help them detect breast cancer in patients sooner.
The main goal of the new breast imaging product is to make things easier for radiologists, said Jan Makela, CEO of imaging at GE HealthCare, in an interview. Mammogram images hold a “huge amount of data,” and radiologists are sometimes tasked with reading more than 100 of these images per day, he pointed out.
“It’s actually quite an intensive process because there’s a lot of data, and it takes quite a long time to read each one when you’re looking for lots of fine points of detail. It’s really quite stressful reading,” Makela explained.
To speed up this process and help ensure that radiologists aren’t overlooking any important aspects within images, MyBreastAI includes three AI applications made by iCAD, a New Hampshire-based company focused on technology for early cancer detection.
The first of these AI tools is called ProFound AI for DBT (digital breast tomosynthesis). This solution helps radiologists make diagnostics decisions by providing insights about things like case scores and the certainty level in finding malignant tissue densities and calcifications. The tool is meant to reduce radiologists’ burnout by helping them understand images more quickly, as well as assist them in prioritizing their caseloads.
MyBreastAI also includes iCAD’s SecondLook for 2D Mammography, an AI application that flags regions of interest on mammograms to alert radiologists once they have finished their initial reading. The aim of this tool is to help ensure clinicians aren’t overlooking anything that might be important in an image.
The last AI solution in MyBreastAI is named PowerLook Density Assessment. This application helps to standardize breast density assessment and reporting to decrease variability among multiple radiologists. The tool seeks to create a more objective and reproducible metric to facilitate individualized screening recommendations.
All three of these AI applications are designed to enhance radiologists’ readings and help ensure that patients’ breast cancer is detected early. The tools are incredibly well-intentioned, but the only way they will be used is if they fit well into radiologists’ workflows, Makela noted. That idea is a significant part of why GE HealthCare created this product — the company is seeking to provide radiologists with a mix of diagnostic AI tools, all in one place, he explained.
“If you’re a busy radiologist, and every AI tool is on a different app, or requires you to change screens, or log in or upload the file, it just takes forever. So having everything integrated together helps customers avoid the extra clicks they don’t want,” Makela declared.
Reducing the number of clicks that clinicians have to deal with has been a major priority for GE Healthcare’s product designers over the past few years, as burnout remains a severe problem among the healthcare workforce, he added.
The MyBreastAI suite will be sold first to providers in the U.S., installed as part of GE HealthCare’s greater mammography technology portfolio.
Photo: GE HealthCare
