Siemens Healthineers previewed two artificial intelligence (AI) solutions – one that assists radiologists in reading chest CT scans and creating reports and another that provides clinical decision support – this week at the 2018 RSNA annual meeting.

Both solutions were designed using extensive data to speed up diagnosis and reduce workloads for radiologists while ensuring quality patient care.

“We’ve had a huge increase in data exponentially over the years so that means that you need to have technologies like AI where you can leverage the value of data across the line,” Joerg Aumueller, head of digitizing healthcare and vice president of marketing for Siemens Healthineers, told HCB News.

AI-Rad Companion Chest CT, which is currently 510(k) pending, uses an AI algorithm to highlight and measure potential abnormalities on a chest CT, such as coronary artery calcifications and lung lesions, and then adds those findings to a structured reports, reducing documentation time.

“Radiologists have to do hundreds of cases per day and the reimbursement is quite low,” Florian Belohlavek, global director of product marketing management for CT at Siemens Healthineers told HCB News. “All that has to be done in a very short time frame and they have to do a lot of cases, so the errors are getting higher. We’re reducing their errors in the assessment of the cases and also analyzing, highlighting and characterizing the information.”

The cloud-based solution can be used with CT scans from all manufacturers and is designed to be integrated into existing workflows.

AI-Pathway Companion, which is currently under development, is an AI-based clinical decision support system designed to help physicians by making suggestions for the next steps for a patient based on patient history, as well as imaging, laboratory and genomics data – information that is often siloed – and on recommended guidelines along the entire clinical pathway for a specific disease.

“It allows the clinicians to really make sure that the right decision is being made at the right time,” Marc Lauterbach, vice president of marketing for digital health services at Siemens Healthineers. “That’s why we are focusing with the AI-Pathway Companion on this main clinical tool in order to make sure that the patient journey is positive, with good outcomes.”

The application will start with prostate cancer, with beta versions for breast cancer and lung cancer.

While the application is designed to bring together specialists to make treatment decisions jointly, Siemens Healthineers debuted it at RSNA because it is looking to show the value that imaging brings to the overall patient management decisions.

“Images are one of the key factors in decision-making,” Lauterbach said. “We believe that radiologists can use this solution to make other clinicians aware of the benefits of certain types of imaging.”

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