GE Healthcare has announced the launch of the AI DReAM project, a consortium that gathers French SMEs, start-ups, research labs and clinical centres to facilitate the development of AI in medical imaging.

Supported with €13 million by the “Investments for the Future” program (PIA), led by the French General Secretariat for Investment and operated by Bpifrance, AI DReAM aims at improving diagnosis accuracy, patient’s care pathway and efficiency of healthcare systems.

Within this project, GE Healthcare will develop an advanced visualization platform with 2D/3D annotation tools to quickly analyze images generated by medical imaging equipment, a 'Software Development Kit' (SDK) to develop clinical and therapeutic applications or research applications, and a technology framework that meets regulatory requirements for the development of medical applications and ensures transparency of learning data, robust learning and traceability of decision-making.

The consortium, led by GE Healthcare, brings together SME Evolucare, Start-ups Therapanacea and Pixyl), Institut Curie, French Paris group of hospital AP-HP, leading European Cancer Center Gustave Roussy and the Paris Hospital Saint Joseph Foundation who will partner on several clinical case studies to help build the platform and tools to accelerate AI projects.

Advances in medical imaging constantly increase our knowledge of diseases and their treatments, creating a surge in the amount of data generated. For each patient to benefit from the promises of personalized medicine, new AI-based tools are needed to aggregate, standardize and make sense of this data quickly.

However, the development of AI applications in medical imaging requires access to large amounts of high-quality annotated data, advanced design visualization capabilities and the ability to trace the development and learnings – which can be a challenge for smaller AI players. AI DReAM aims at leveraging AI know-how and capabilities to accelerate the development of AI solutions and help structure an AI healthcare ecosystem.

 “Our aim is to create the tools that will facilitate large scale data annotation and algorithm design, testing and validation to cut cycle development time for AI start-ups, researchers or radiologists who wish to create AI applications for medical imaging,” explained Baptiste Perrin, AI DReAM project leader at GE Healthcare.

Several applications are already under development as part of this project, including around the management of liver cancer with artificial intelligence characterization tools, the diagnosis and prognosis of lung diseases, the accuracy and personalization of treatments for brain cancer or patient follow-up.

The implementation of use cases with the partners will ensure that the platform is adequate for more projects in multiple clinical areas. Eventually, it will be offered to other partners using medical imaging.

AI DReAM leverages GE Healthcare's Edison intelligence platform designed to help achieve greater efficiency, improve patient outcomes, and increase access to care – by accelerating the adoption of advanced applications and services across the health system. – TradeArabia News Service