Google Cloud has announced a new AI-powered medical imaging tool that is designed to take the pressure of medical staff, and it’s already available to try out.

Medical professionals have long utilized imaging to help them diagnose patients with various illnesses, but specialist training is required and the process can be time consuming. Nevertheless, it’s a vital part of the diagnosis process, with images accounting for around 90% of all healthcare data according to Google.

The company hopes its new Google Cloud Medical Imaging Suite tool will be able to recognize a large proportion of sicknesses so that medical staff can free up more time for treating patients. The so-called Medical Imaging Suite will also prove valuable in countries where specially trained staff are few and far between.

Google Cloud Medical Imaging Suite

The Google Cloud Medical Imaging Suite webpage explains how Nvidia and Monai integration aid with areas such as AI annotation, which would otherwise typically involve medical staff manually labelling images to teach the system how to identify illnesses.

BigQuery and Looker also feature in the new platform, which Google says will allow its users to “view and search petabytes of imaging data to perform advanced analytics and create training datasets with zero operational overhead”, while Vertex AI access is also included to help organizations create AI pipelines and build scalable machine learning models, without the need for extensive coding. In fact, Google claims 80% fewer lines of code are required for custom modeling.

In terms of secure cloud storage and regulation compliancy, the internationally recognized DICOM file format is supported for storing and transferring images, like x-rays, MRIs, and ultrasounds.

So far, Google has partnered with NetApp to enable “seamless” on-prem to cloud data management, Change Healthcare, and a number of other service partners.

Pricing for the Medical Imaging Suite can be obtained by reaching out to Google Cloud for a customized quote either by chat or by phone. The sales team was closed when we reached out, however pricing will vary case-by-case.

By Craig Hale.