Imaging Advantage launches radiology focused machine learning initiative

A new machine-learning research initiative - Singularity Healthcare - has been launched by US cloud-based radiology service provider, Imaging Advantage.

The project involves top academics from both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Medical School and aims to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) capable of pre-reading digital x-rays to identify potential areas of disease and injury, whilst learning from Imaging Advantage's image databank of 7 billion.

Some of the leading names in the project include SP Kothari, PhD, and Gordon Y Billard, Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management, who will lead the project, with Dr Sanjay Saini, Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Vice Chairman of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital advising on imaging quality and utility to radiologists. Kalyan Veeramachaneni, PhD, Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Institute for Data, Systems and Society will also be involved.

"Inconsistency in testing and access to care contribute significantly to $1 trillion of waste in the $2.8 trillion US healthcare industry," said Brian Hall, Imaging Advantage's President and COO. "If successful, Singularity will introduce a solution with potential to transform radiology by providing faster, more accurate and less expensive diagnostic testing, representing an indispensable innovation for radiologists."

The aim is to extend the platform beyond x-rays into both CT and MRI scans "as well as other areas of time-consuming diagnostic testing," he explained.

Imaging Advantage has 500 radiologists and 450 facilities across the US, which will benefit from the technology, and the wider benefits could be great given that half of all radiology tests in the US are x-rays.

Imaging Advantage's initiative follows the current trend of machine and digital integration in healthcare. Human Longevity Inc (HLI) recently reported a new genomics-focused collaboration with AstraZeneca, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Finland's Institute for Molecular Medicine that will use its machine-learning techniques for genome analysis and drug discovery.

Singularity Healthcare is set to launch in Q2 of 2016.