Google Partners With European Conglomerate Bayer For New AI-Powered Solutions For Radiologists

On Tuesday, Bayer AG BAYRY and Alphabet Inc’s GOOG GOOGL Google Cloud announced a collaboration to develop artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to support radiologists.

As part of the collaboration, Bayer will further develop its platform to accelerate the development and deployment of AI-powered healthcare applications with a clear focus on radiology, using Google Cloud’s technology, including its generative AI (gen AI) tools. 

The collaboration aims to help organizations overcome many challenges to building scalable and compliant AI-powered medical imaging software products using leading data security capabilities and accelerate the development of impactful solutions.

Medical imaging data accounts for about 90% of all healthcare data. It is a highly complex and rich clinical data modality and a critical tool for diagnosing patients. 

Billions of medical images get scanned globally each year, and this number continues to grow, increasing the workload for radiologists and other healthcare professionals tasked with handling and interpreting these images for clinicians and patients. 

The platform’s generative AI flags anomalies within images for radiologists to look at, and it can also pull up relevant information from that patient’s medical history, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, told CNBC. 

Suppose a patient comes in for an annual breast cancer screening, for example. In that case, the platform can detect current problems, compare the image to prior screenings, and summarize that information, he said. 

The goal is to give radiologists the necessary information and save them from spending 15 or 20 minutes searching through patient records, Kurian said. 

Healthcare and life science companies will be able to deploy gen AI medical solutions standardized for flexible integration across compatible healthcare systems and analyze field data for insights, bias detection, and continuous improvement.

The platform is built on Google Cloud and uses tools like Vertex AI, BigQuery, Healthcare API, and Chronicle. 

The first version of the Bayer’s platform for extended testing will be available later this year in the EU and U.S.

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