GE HealthCare announces AI Innovation Lab with five research projects

GE HealthCare recently unveiled its new AI Innovation Lab, designed to fast-track early-stage AI research projects within the organization. This lab aims to revolutionize healthcare by integrating AI across medical devices, improving decision-making in patient care, and driving better outcomes system-wide. This innovation hub is part of a broader strategy underpinned by cloud technology, which ensures AI can be scaled effectively.

As Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, GE HealthCare's Global Chief Science and Technology Officer, explains: "At GE HealthCare, we're not just developing technology — we're striving to break new ground by exploring novel ways that AI could enable healthcare."

How does it work?

The AI Innovation Lab focuses on diverse research projects aimed at enhancing diagnostics, reducing administrative workloads, and personalizing patient care. Key projects include:

• Bringing the knowledge of a multi-disciplinary team to clinicians' fingertips with agentic AI: The Health Companion project explores whether an agentic AI approach driven by multiple agents, each an expert in a particular area (i.e., genomics, radiology, pathology, etc.), could help physicians streamline their clinical decision-making and deliver more personalized care. The project's vision is for these agents to collaborate and analyze multi-modal data in order to proactively generate treatment plan recommendations, continuously adapting based on new information.
• Using AI to better predict triple negative breast cancer recurrence: GE HealthCare is supporting the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University on research focused on the early prediction of triple negative breast cancer recurrence. Triple negative breast cancer is the most aggressive breast cancer subtype, however, there is a shortage of tools to predict its recurrence.
• Innovating solutions to enhance care for moms and babies: Preventable risks associated with childbirth are one of the most pressing health issues facing women today. GE HealthCare is working directly with health systems and their care teams to develop solutions that help address this challenge. For example, GE HealthCare is working on a care companion initiative that is investigating how generative AI could minimize the effort spent searching through data and seeking best practices.
• Researching multi-modal X-ray foundation model: GE HealthCare is working on a research project to create a full-body foundation model, built on a dataset of 1.2 million anonymized PHI-free X-ray images from diverse regions across the body. This model shows great potential, and is yielding promising early internal benchmark testing on key tasks including segmentation, classification, and visual localization. The project is also experimenting with having the model automate medical report generation and interpret images into text to accelerate the workflow for radiologists, with the aim to help alleviate care teams' administrative burdens.
• Helping radiologists scale mammography screenings: Approximately 90% of screening mammograms in the U.S. are normal, yet there is no efficient way for radiologists to quickly separate the clearly normal scans from potentially suspicious ones. GE HealthCare is developing this cloud-based AI concept to explore how foundation models can help clinicians quickly identify normal breast screening exams, allowing radiologists to focus more of their time on suspicious cases.

All these projects involve advanced AI algorithms and rely on collaboration with cloud computing giants like Amazon Web Services to manage massive datasets.

Why does it matter?

Healthcare faces challenges such as clinician burnout, diagnostic inaccuracies, and resource shortages, making AI integration critical. By simplifying workflows, AI can allow healthcare professionals to focus more on patient care.

By focusing on innovations that offer practical, scalable solutions - GE HealthCare is contributing to healthcare's digital transformation and setting benchmarks for other players in the field.

The context

GE HealthCare has a 125-year legacy of innovation, combined with a start-up-like drive to address modern healthcare needs. The company has already received 80 FDA authorizations for AI-powered devices, marking it as a leader in this field for three consecutive years. As the healthcare industry grapples with global issues like clinician shortages, complex diagnostics, and inconsistent patient outcomes, GE HealthCare's AI projects seek to bridge these gaps.

As Dr. Kass-Hout notes, "The pioneering projects we're showcasing today are just some of the innovations we have underway, enabled by our AI and cloud computing capabilities."