New Intel-Based Artificial Intelligence Imaging Solution to Accelerate Critical Patient Diagnoses

What’s New: Intel and GE Healthcare* are teaming up to deliver artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across multiple medical imaging formats to help prioritize and streamline patient care. By leveraging the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit running on Intel® processor-based X-ray systems, GE Healthcare is accelerating deep learning with medical imaging at the point of care. Using this system, X-ray technologists, critical care teams and radiologists will be immediately notified to review critical findings that may accelerate patient diagnosis.

“With the OpenVINO toolkit running on existing Intel processors, in early testing GE Healthcare achieved a 3.3 times improvement in deep learning optimization, which enables early prioritization and escalation of critical conditions to ensure faster treatment for our patients. Intel technologies will enable GE Healthcare to extend AI solutions across multiple imaging modalities to transform radiologist workflows and patient care.”
–Keith Bigelow, SVP of Edison Portfolio Strategy, GE Healthcare

Why It’s Important: Medical imaging is the largest and fastest-growing data source in the healthcare industry. It accounts for 90 percent of all healthcare data – and more than 97 percent of it goes unanalyzed or unused1. Before now, processing this massive volume of medical imaging data could lead to longer turnaround times from image acquisition to diagnosis to care. Meanwhile, patients’ health could decline while they wait for diagnosis. Especially when it comes to critical conditions, rapid analysis and escalation is essential to accelerate treatment.

By deploying deep learning solutions on existing infrastructure, optimized with Intel AI software solutions, GE Healthcare has the potential to power more efficient and effective care, enhance decision-making, and drive greater value for patients and providers.

Why It Matters: One key implementation of this technology is providing earlier detection of a collapsed lung, also known as “pneumothorax” – a potentially life-threatening event. Radiologists can now deploy optimized predictive algorithms that scan for and detect pneumothorax within seconds at the point of care, allowing rapid response and reprioritization of an X-ray for clinical diagnosis.

What the Results Show: In early testing, when GE Healthcare employed the OpenVINO toolkit on its pneumothorax models, pneumothorax detection on its Intel processor-based X-ray system accelerated by 3.3 times compared with models without OpenVINO toolkit optimizations. Optimizations improved performance across models, with the pneumothorax model receiving the most benefit. Overall pneumothorax detection dropped from just over three seconds to within seconds.

More Context: GE Healthcare Accelerates Pneumothorax Detection at Point of Care with Intel AI (Whitepaper) | Intel at RSNA 2018 (Blog) | Artificial Intelligence at Intel

The Small Print:

System test configuration: Intel® Core™ i5-4590S CPU @ 3.00GHZ, x86_64, VT-x enabled, 16GB memory, OS: Linux magic x86_64 GNU/Linux, Ubuntu 16.04 inferencing service docker container. Testing done by GE Healthcare, September 2018.

Intel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. Performance varies depending on system configuration. No computer system can be absolutely secure. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer or learn more at Intel.com.

Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more complete information, visit: http://www.intel.com/performance

1http://newsroom.gehealthcare.com/beyond-imaging-ai-imaging-innovation/#_ftn1