Bayer and Google Partner on New AI Product for Radiologists

Medical imaging data comprises around 90% of all healthcare data, and it is a highly complex and rich clinical data modality and serves as a vital tool for diagnosing patients. Each year, billions of medical images are scanned across the world and this number continues to grow, increasing the workload of radiologists and healthcare professionals responsible for handling and interpreting these images for clinicians and patients. There is a need to develop and maintain new supportive artificial intelligence (AI) tools to efficiently handle and analyze the huge amount of data. Now, a new innovation platform aims to help organizations develop AI-powered apps to assist radiologists, reduce burnout and support more efficient diagnoses.

Bayer (Leverkusen, Germany) and Google Cloud (Mountain View, CA, USA) have entered into a collaboration to develop AI solutions that can support radiologists and better serve patients. As part of the collaboration, Bayer will further develop its innovation platform to speed up 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 overcome several challenges faced by organizations in building scalable and compliant AI-powered medical imaging software products using leading data security capabilities and speed up the development of potentially groundbreaking and impactful solutions that can benefit patients.

Bayer's innovation platform provides a cloud-native pipeline from product idea to launch. Users can 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. Additionally, users can explore and extract information from regulations and scientific papers, all within a collaboration platform with the latest data security capabilities. Developers can also 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. Healthcare and life science companies can 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. The company plans to make the first version for extended testing available later this year in the EU and US. By combining Bayer's deep radiology, healthcare regulatory, and clinical data handling expertise with Google's technology leadership in gen AI and other fields, the partnership has the potential to significantly impact the healthcare ecosystem, by improving patient outcomes, lowering costs, and accelerating innovation. The expanded collaboration on the new innovation platform builds upon a 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 on responsible AI adoption to transform patient care across the world.

"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, of 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."