Critical Care Suite
GE Healthcare has received FDA 510(k) clearance of its Critical Care Suite, which a press release reports are an industry-first collection of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms embedded on a mobile X-ray device. Built in collaboration with UC San Francisco (UCSF), using GE Healthcare’s Edison platform, the AI algorithms are designed to reduce the turn-around time it can take for radiologists to review a suspected pneumothorax.
When a patient is scanned on a device with Critical Care Suite, the system automatically analyses the images by simultaneously searching for a pneumothorax. If a pneumothorax is suspected, an alert—along with the original chest X-ray—is sent directly to the radiologist for review via picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). The technologist also receives a subsequent on-device notification to give awareness of the prioritized cases. Quality-focused AI algorithms simultaneously analyse and flag protocol and field of view errors as well as auto rotate the images on-device. Critical Care Suite and the quality algorithms were developed using GE Healthcare’s Edison platform, which helps deploy AI algorithms quickly and securely, and deployed on the company’s Optima XR240amx system.
Additionally, embedding Critical Care Suite on-device aims to offer several benefits to radiologists and technologists. For critical findings, according to the press release, GE Healthcare’s algorithms are a fast and reliable way to ensure AI results are generated within seconds of image acquisition, without any dependency on connectivity or transfer speeds to produce the AI results. These results are then sent to the radiologist at the same time that the device sends the original diagnostic image, ensuring no additional processing delay. Also, automatically running quality checks on-device integrates them into the technologist’s standard workflow and enables technologist actions—such as rejections or reprocessing—to occur at the patient’s bedside and before the images are sent to PACS.
Kieran Murphy, president & CEO, GE Healthcare, comments: “X-ray—the world’s oldest form of medical imaging—just got a whole lot smarter, and soon, the rest of our offerings will too. GE Healthcare is leading the way in the creation of AI applications for diagnostic imaging and taking what was once a promise and turning it into a reality. By integrating AI into every aspect of care, we will ultimately improve patient outcomes, reduce waste and inefficiencies, and eliminate costly errors. Critical Care Suite is just the beginning.”
GE Healthcare’s Edison offering comprises applications and smart devices built using the Edison platform. The platform uses an extensive catalogue of healthcare-specific developer services to enable both GE developers and select strategic partners to design, develop, manage, secure and distribute advanced applications, services and AI algorithms quickly. Edison integrates and assimilates data from multiple sources, applying analytics and AI to not only transform data, but provide actionable insights that can be deployed on medical devices, via the cloud or at the edge of the device.
