Google on Tuesday announced a new set of artificial intelligence tools aimed at letting healthcare organizations use the search giant’s software and servers to read, store and label X-rays, MRIs and other medical imaging.

The tools, from Google’s cloud unit, allow hospitals and medical companies to search through imaging metadata or develop software to quickly analyze images for diagnoses. Called the Medical Imaging Suite, the tools can also help healthcare professionals to automatically annotate medical images and build machine learning models for research.

“With the advancements in medical imaging technology, there's been an increase in the size and complexity of these images,” Alissa Hsu Lynch, Google Cloud’s global lead for health tech strategy and solutions, said in an interview. “We know that AI can enable faster, more accurate diagnosis and therefore help improve productivity for healthcare workers.”

Based on Google's other forays into healthcare, privacy advocates may raise concerns that the tech giant, which makes the majority of its $257 billion annual revenue from personalized ads based on user data, would use patient information to feed its vast advertising machine.

Lynch says Google doesn’t have any access to patients’ protected health information, and none of the data from the service would be used for the company’s advertising efforts. Google claims the service is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, a federal law that regulates the use of patient data.

The tech giant is working with a handful of medical organizations as early partners for the imaging software. One partner, a company called Hologic, is using the Google suite for cloud storage, as well as developing tech to help improve cervical cancer diagnostics. Another partner called Hackensack Meridian Health, a network of healthcare providers in New Jersey, is using the tools to scrub identifying information from millions of gigabytes of X-rays. The company will also use the software to help build an algorithm for predicting the metastasis of prostate cancer.

The new tools come as Google and its parent company Alphabet invest more heavily in health-related initiatives. In the early days of the pandemic, Alphabet’s Verily unit, which focuses on life-sciences and med tech, partnered with the Trump administration to provide online screening for Covid tests. Google also partnered with Apple to create a system for contract tracing on smartphones. Last year the company dissolved its Google Health unit, restructuring its health efforts so they weren’t housed in one central division.

Google has stirred controversy in the past for its healthcare efforts. In 2019, Google drew blowback for an initiative called Project Nightingale, in which the company partnered with Ascension, the second-largest healthcare system in the country, to collect the personal health information of millions of people. The data included lab results, diagnoses and hospitalization records, including names and birthdays, according to the Wall Street Journal, though Google at the time said the project complied with federal law. Google had reportedly been using the data in part to design new software.

Two years earlier, the tech giant partnered with the National Institute of Health to publicly post more than 100,000 images of human chest X-rays. The goal there was to showcase the company’s cloud storage capabilities and make the data available to researchers. But two days before the images were to be posted, the NIH told Google its software had not properly removed data from the X-rays that could identify patients, according to The Washington Post, which would potentially violate federal law. In response, Google canceled its project with NIH.

Asked about Google’s past fumble with de-identifying information, Sameer Sethi, SVP and chief data and analytics officer at Hackensack Meridian Health, says the company has safeguards in place to prevent such mishaps.

“You never actually trust the tool,” he told Forbes. He adds Hackensack Meridian Health works with a third-party company to certify that the images are de-identified, even after using Google’s tools. “We will not bring anything to use without expert determination.”

By Richard Nivea