GE Healthcare Begins 3 New Alliances to Boost Cancer Care

GE Healthcare began collaborations with SOPHiA GENETICS, The University of Cambridge, and Optellum as part of its vision to advance care, make precision health more accessible, and ultimately improve outcomes for cancer patients.
 
These alliances are intended to help GE Healthcare support integrated health systems at the local level by providing the technology to deploy software across imaging networks and helping to make the newest innovations accessible across the broader population. It is hoped this will enable local oncologists and medical experts to deliver earlier diagnoses and more accurate treatments—a crucial component in achieving positive health outcomes with cancer patients.
 
“Cross-functional partnerships between organizations are key to the creation of new approaches and intelligent tools that enable cancer to be detected as early as possible and with the greatest degree of accuracy,” said Dr. Ben Newton, Global Head of Oncology Solutions at GE Healthcare. “By partnering with SOPHiA GENETICS, Optellum, and the University of Cambridge, we’re looking to create a more powerful oncology care pathway that promotes high-quality, personalized, and effective medical care.”
 
GE Healthcare’s comprehensive diagnostic imaging and monitoring portfolio can be deployed throughout the patient’s cancer journey, from initial screening and diagnosis, through therapy guidance facilitating minimally invasive treatment, to monitoring patient progress.
 
As cases of cancer continue to rise and are predicted to reach 29.5 million new cases per year by 2040¹ there is a growing demand for data-driven medicine, both for clinical practice and clinical trials. GE Healthcare is utilizing its Edison platform to integrate data from diverse sources, such as electronic health records (EHR) and radiology information systems (RIS), imaging and other medical device data. This integrated data can be used to develop and deploy AI enabled solutions to help simplify oncology patient workflows, better understand increasingly complicated clinical patient data, and compare data from patient to patient.
 
SOPHiA GENETICS and GE Healthcare will be collaborating on opportunities in the healthcare market, including various initiatives and projects in the fields of digital oncology and radiogenomic analysis. The companies will initially work together on the creation of infrastructure to integrate data between GE’s Edison platform and the SOPHiA DDM platform, as well as co-marketing and pilot site recruitment across oncology and radiogenomics.
 
The companies will be deploying GE Healthcare’s extensive medical imaging and monitoring capabilities and Edison platform-enabled data aggregation with the SOPHiA DDM cloud-based software-as-a-service analytics genomic insights platform and related solutions, which are available in more than 750 hospitals, laboratories and biopharma companies.
 
The University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Hospitals and GE Healthcare have agreed to collaborate on developing an application aiming to improve cancer care, with Cambridge providing clinical expertise and data to support GE Healthcare’s development and evaluation of an AI-enhanced application that integrates cancer patient data from multiple sources into a single interface.
 
Building on research supported by The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and Cancer Research UK, the collaboration aims to address the problems of fragmented or siloed data and disconnected patient information, which is challenging for clinicians to manage effectively and can prevent cancer patients receiving optimal treatment.
 
UK-based company Optellum is a leader in AI- decision support for the early diagnosis and optimal treatment of lung cancer. Together, the companies are seeking to address one of the largest challenges in the diagnosis of lung cancer, helping providers to determine the malignancy of a lung nodule: a suspicious lesion that may be benign or cancerous. The majority of incidentally detected pulmonary nodules present an indeterminate cancer risk, which are incredibly challenging for clinicians to diagnose and manage, leading to delayed treatment for cancer patients and invasive procedures on healthy people.
 
Optellum’s Virtual Nodule Clinic identifies and scores the probability of malignancy in a lung nodule, which is key to determining whether biopsy is necessary, and accelerating diagnosis. It is the only FDA-cleared AI-assisted diagnosis software for early-stage lung cancer², and has been shown to improve the sensitivity and specificity of malignancy assessments of indeterminate nodules³—enabling pulmonologists and radiologists to make optimal clinical decisions⁴.
 
References
¹ https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics
² EIT Health https://eithealth.eu/news-article/eit-health-supported-optellum-marks-ai-world-first/
³ Massion PP, Antic S, Ather S, et al. Assessing the Accuracy of a Deep Learning Method to Risk Stratify Indeterminate Pulmonary Nodules. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2020 Jul 15;202(2):241-249. https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201903-0505OC
⁴ Vachani A, Massion P, Munden R, Gleeson F, Bellinger C, Dotson T, Freitag L, Imaging AI/”Radiomics” decision support improves physicians’ stratification of indeterminate pulmonary nodules: A Multiple-Reader Multiple-Case study presented to The ACS National Lung Cancer Roundtable (NLCRT) 2020.