Bayer and Google Cloud to Accelerate Development of AI-powered Healthcare Applications for Radiologists

On Apr 10, 2024

Bayer and Google Cloud announced a collaboration on the development of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to support radiologists and ultimately better serve patients. As part of the collaboration, Bayer will further develop its innovation platform to accelerate the development and deployment of AI-powered healthcare applications with a clear focus on radiology, using Google Cloud’s technology, including its generative AI (gen AI) tools. The collaboration aims to help organizations overcome many of the challenges to building scalable and compliant AI-powered medical imaging software products using leading data security capabilities, and accelerate the development of potentially groundbreaking and impactful solutions that ultimately benefit patients.

“Radiology plays a vital role in healthcare, and the need to efficiently and accurately uncover insights and deliver solutions at scale that can improve patient outcomes has never been greater,” said Nelson Ambrogio, president, Radiology at Bayer. “Bayer has a heritage in radiology with decades of contributions to radiological research and innovation. Through the collaboration with Google Cloud, our joint efforts will help organizations in the healthcare and life science industry transform the growing amounts of data into valuable and impactful insights, saving radiologists time and helping them optimize their important work for the benefit of patients.”

“Radiologists and other clinicians face burnout due to the sheer volume of work they face every day. Gen AI can help tackle repetitive tasks and provide insights into massive data sets, saving valuable time and helping to positively impact patient outcomes,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “We look forward to our continued collaboration with Bayer as it shapes the future of diagnostics and helps its customers deliver insights to patients with greater accuracy and speed.”

Medical imaging data accounts for about 90 percent of all healthcare data, and it is a highly complex and rich clinical data modality and a very critical tool used to diagnose patients. Billions of medical images get scanned globally each year and this number continues to grow increasing the workload for radiologists and other healthcare professionals tasked with handling and interpreting these images for clinicians and patients. Many new supportive AI tools need to be developed and maintained to handle and analyze this enormous amount of data efficiently.

Bayer’s innovation platform provides a cloud-native pipeline from product idea to launch:

Analyze and experiment: The users will be able to uncover insights with AI-powered data analysis, and help design breakthrough healthcare solutions by accessing a data ecosystem, as well as using intelligent search and data preparation capabilities. In addition, users will have the ability to explore and extract information from regulations and scientific papers, all within a collaboration platform with leading data security capabilities.
Build and validate: Developers will also be able to scale and engineer solutions using gen AI assistance for ideation, development, validation, and lifecycle management; generate documents in alignment with healthcare requirements to aid in gaining regulatory approval; leverage medical imaging core lab services from Bayer for clinical performance evaluation.
Launch and monitor: Healthcare and life science companies will be able to deploy gen AI medical solutions standardized for flexible integration across compatible healthcare systems; and analyze field data for insights, bias detection, and continuous improvement.

The platform is built on Google Cloud and uses tools like Vertex AI, BigQuery, Healthcare API and Chronicle. Bayer’s platform is designed to help bring innovative medical imaging tools to market faster and more cost-effectively, and a first version for extended testing is planned to be made available later this year in the EU and United States.

The pairing of Bayer’s deep radiology, healthcare regulatory, and clinical data handling expertise with Google’s technology leadership in gen AI and other fields has the potential to significantly impact the healthcare ecosystem, by improving patient outcomes, reducing costs, and accelerating the pace of innovation.

The expanded collaboration on the new innovation platform builds upon the long-standing partnership between Bayer and Google Cloud across a wide range of technologies and efforts, including accelerating drug discovery and supporting patient diagnosis. Bayer and Google Cloud are also working together to transform patient care worldwide through responsible AI adoption.