Google Cloud’s Medical Imaging Suite to make AI-based diagnosis more accessible Posted on : Oct 04 - 2022

Google Cloud is bringing its expertise in vision-based artificial intelligence to the healthcare industry with the launch of its new Medical Imaging Suite today.

Vision AI has the potential to make a massive impact in healthcare. Medical imaging is one of the most critical tools used by hospitals to diagnose patients, and each year billions of images are made by clinicians to help them understand why people are sick. Google said medical images are so important that they account for about 90% of all healthcare data.

The problem doctors have is that medical images are complex, as it takes expertise to look at one and understand if the patient is inflicted with some kind of disease. Until now, that has always meant human expertise. As a result, radiologists and other healthcare professionals in many hospitals face a huge workload.

Available now, Google Cloud’s Medical Imaging Suite is designed to change this, using AI algorithms to scan medical images and provide faster and more accurate diagnoses. In this way, it thinks it can help increase productivity for healthcare workers while improving care access and patient outcomes.

The offering is designed to address the most common pain points that have prevented healthcare organizations from implementing AI before. The Imaging Lab provides access to ready-made AI-based annotation tools created by Nvidia Corp. and Monai that can perform repetitive, manual tasks such as labeling medical images.

Also onboard is Google’s BigQuery and Looker services, which can be used to search and view petabytes of imaging data. User can then perform advanced analytics on this data, or even use it to create training datasets for new AI models.

The suite’s Imaging AI Pipelines module provides access to Vertex AI, giving users a way to rapidly create AI pipelines and build scalable machine learning models with minimal custom coding.

“Google pioneered the use of AI and computer vision in Google Photos, Google Image Search, and Google Lens, and now we’re making our imaging expertise, tools, and technologies available for healthcare and life sciences enterprises,” said Alissa Hsu Lynch, global lead of Google Cloud’s MedTech Strategy and Solutions. “Our Medical Imaging Suite shows what’s possible when tech and healthcare companies come together.”

Google Cloud’s Medical Imaging Suite also goes to great lengths to ensure the privacy and security of image data, solving one of the main headaches for healthcare providers: compliance. The suite leverages Google’s Cloud Healthcare application programming interface to provide secure data exchange over the DICOMweb standard for secure image transfers. The Cloud Healthcare API is a fully managed, enterprise-grade development environment that offers automated DICOM de-identification.

Lastly, Google said there are multiple deployment options available for the Medical Imaging Suite, including cloud, on-premises or at the edge. This flexibility will ensure that healthcare customers are able to meet a diverse set of data security, privacy and sovereignty requirements, Google said, with centralized management and policy enforcement provided by Google Distributed Cloud. View more