GE Healthcare on Monday announced a new AI Innovation Lab primed to focus on five key areas of research including the early detection of whether a triple negative breast cancer will reoccur in patients.

The Lab is aimed at integrating AI into medical equipment and also to build applications that would simplify decision-making across the health sector.

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“The AI Innovation Lab lifts the curtain on the work we are undertaking at the vanguard of healthcare innovation,” Dr Taha Kass-Hout, GE HealthCare’s Global Chief Science and Technology Officer said in a statement on Monday. “At GE HealthCare, we’re not just developing technology—we’re striving to break new ground by exploring novel ways that AI could enable healthcare.”

One of the key projects of GE 

Healthcare was a partnership with Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, where medical professionals will use AI to predict the recurrence of triple-negative breast cancer in women who have previously survived it.

Most aggressive breast cancer have 50 percent chance of recurrence 

Triple-negative breast cancer, according to GE Healthcare, is the most aggressive subtype of breast cancer, and there were limited medical tools to predict a recurrence.

Already, there was data showing that 50 percent of p

patients who were diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer between stages I and III were likely to have a recurrence.

GE Healthcare explained that the research will help medical professionals better analyse and understand data to signify a recurrence so as to inform “a treatment plan” for patients.

“The goal of this research is to use deep learning to evaluate multi-modal data including genomics and pathology information to investigate if AI can better predict the likelihood of recurrence and help the care team inform a treatment plan and monitoring schedule,” GE Health said in its announcement.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will provide grants to fund the research which would have Dr Sunil Badve from Emory University as  Principal Investigator (PI) and Dr  Soumya Ghose as the Co-PI and representative of GE HealthCare for the project.

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AI to id scan of breast cancer in mammograms

Another key project for the AI Innovation Lab was assisting radiologists to quickly identify  scans of a suspicious case of breast cancer from a normal scan using AI.

The GE Health stated that approximately 90 percent mammograms in the United States were normal at first glance to radiologists who still lacked quicker means to identify and separate suspicious cases from normal ones.

“GE HealthCare is developing this cloud-based AI concept to explore how foundation models can help clinicians quickly identify normal breast screening exams, allowing radiologists to focus more of their time on suspicious cases,” the statement said.