As artificial intelligence’s role in clinical operations becomes more entrenched, providers are partnering with tech companies to deploy models more quickly.
Boston-based Mass General Brigham’s partnership with Nuance Communications, a conversational AI company acquired by Microsoft and NVIDIA, a computing company, is the latest example of this kind of alliance. Brigham said its newest partnership allows an AI-powered cloud platform to work with an open-source medical-imaging framework, called MONAI, to lead to faster deployment of algorithms.
“Prior to this activity, it was difficult for us to take the assets of those works that happen through researchers and be able to deploy those into clinical purposes,” said Dr. Keith Dreyer, Mass General Brigham’s chief data science officer.
Dreyer said the framework allows models to be deployed much more quickly.
“It’s this combination that’s allowed us to be able to decrease model adoption times from years down to months and weeks,” Dreyer said.
Mass General Brigham is one the first major medical centers to use MONAI and the AI-powered platform from Nuance together. This framework has led to faster deployment of breast density AI model, which allows women to get the results of their scans before they leave the building.
Experts say the crucial part is coordinating and integrating solutions into existing workflows quickly that can aid providers without creating additional burdens.
“The key piece is how do we get this 99% of the algorithms that are being developed by some of the world's leading researchers around the world into a framework that allows it to be deployed in many different places?” said David Niewolny, NVIDIA’s director of healthcare business development.
If those barriers are addressed, Dreyer said the potential is exciting.
“These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to some of the potential applications that we have underway,” Dreyer said.
