GE Healthcare and Optellum today announced that they have signed a letter of intent to collaborate to advance precision diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. GE Healthcare is a global leader in medical imaging solutions. Optellum is the leader in AI decision support for the early diagnosis and optimal treatment of lung cancer. This press release features multimedia. Together, the companies are seeking to address one of the largest challenges in the diagnosis of lung cancer, helping providers to determine the malignancy of a lung nodule: a suspicious lesion that may be benign or cancerous.

This announcement accelerates Optellum's market entry, building on its FDA clearance earlier this year and deployments underway at hospitals in the USA and ongoing clinical trials in the United Kingdom. It identifies and tracks at-risk patients and assigns a Lung Cancer Prediction score to lung nodules: small lesions, frequently detected in chest Computed Tomography (CT) scans that may or may not be cancerous. The Optellum AI will be used to drive accurate early diagnosis and optimal treatment decisions with the aim of treating patients earlier, potentially at a pre-cancerous stage, increasing survival rates.

To understand the benefits that artificial intelligence can bring to the world of human medicine, consider the case of Ayako Yamashita, a 60-year-old Japanese woman, whose condition befuddled doctors in 2015. Yamashita was thought to be suffering from acute myeloid leukemia. But after several unsuccessful treatment attempts, her doctors decided to search for another answer to her condition. They turned to IBM's Watson, an AI system capable of analyzing vast amounts of data. The computer reviewed nearly 20 million previously-published oncological research studies and cross-referenced data points. Watson's analysis suggested the woman had a rare form of leukemia not detected through conventional methods.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already proven useful in the healthcare industry, and now, two newly developed AI diagnostics systems could change how doctors diagnose heart disease and lung cancer. Cardiologists are very good at their jobs, but they're not infallible. To determine whether or not something's wrong with a patient's heart, a cardiologist will assess the timing of their heartbeat in scans. According to a report by BBC News, 80 percent of the time, their diagnosis of various heart problems is correct, but it's the remaining 20 percent that shows the process has room for improvement. To that end, a team of researchers from the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, developed Ultromics, an AI diagnostics system that is more accurate than doctors at diagnosing heart disease. Ultromics was trained using the heart scans of 1,000 patients treated by the company's chief medical officer, Paul Leeson, as well as information about whether or not those patients went on to suffer heart problems.