Arterys Inc., a privately-held company dedicated to deep learning medical imaging technology, continues to advance improved imaging capabilities bringing artificial intelligence called deep learning to the healthcare field, beginning with the heart. In what will be the first broad commercialization of Arterys technology, GE Healthcare and Arterys have agreed to collaborate, incorporating Arterys’ proprietary quantification and medical imaging technology with GE Healthcare’s magnetic resonance (MR) cardiac solutions.
At the 101st Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, Illinois, GE Healthcare introduced ViosWorks*, a cardiac MRI solution that seeks to help solve several cardiac MR challenges at once. GE Healthcare’s ViosWorks is designed to deliver a three-dimensional spatial and velocity-encoded dataset at every time point during the cardiac cycle, yielding high resolution, time-resolved images of the beating heart and a measure of the speed and direction of blood flow at each location.
The Arterys™ System is a critical component of the end-to-end cardiac MR solution from GE Healthcare that enables non-invasive clinical visualization and accurate quantification of blood flow inside the heart and offers a new comprehensive cardiac solution to diagnose cardiovascular anomalies and disease. The seven-dimensional data (three in space, one in time, three in direction) provides comprehensive data quickly and easily to improve diagnoses in cardiac medicine. To view videos of the Arterys™ System, please click here and here.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death. To understand the underlying cause of disease using an MRI can take hours, is reserved to elite medical institutions and is a very complex procedure resulting in only partial diagnosis,” said Fabien Beckers, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Arterys. “Using the Arterys System together with cloud computation, the diagnoses can be made in a non-invasive MR imaging procedure that is quick, accessible and easy for both the patient and the radiologist.”
After years of development, Arterys is now collaborating with GE Healthcare to further commercialize these exciting new capabilities for advanced imaging and analysis of the heart for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) assessments. Through Arterys’ deep learning and artificial intelligence software techniques, cardiac assessments on GE MR systems can occur in a fraction of the time of conventional cardiac MR scans.
Importantly, in addition to our systems, which are installed in several leading hospitals for research use, the commercial launch of the Arterys™ System with GE Healthcare’s ViosWorks will open the door to harnessing the extensive amount of data gathered during an MR scan for thousands of patients each day,” Dr. Beckers continued. “As we receive patient data and confirmation of physician-guided diagnoses, the Arterys algorithm is designed to continuously learn and improve, moving further along the spectrum of deep learning, and allowing one physician to benefit from the inputs of thousands.”
For each cardiac MRI performed, 30,000 images are securely uploaded to a cloud-based platform for visualization and quantification. Arterys has developed a proprietary algorithm that is then applied to analyze the images, identifying the flow of blood through the heart, computing the most time consuming values that help the physician getting an accurate diagnosis faster. Building on a rich base of patient studies, the Arterys System automates segmentation, eliminating the tedious work of drawing circles and calculating measurements between areas of the heart. The painstaking analyses previously performed by radiologists are now available automatically with metrics such as flow velocity, stroke volume, cardiac output and ejection fraction. The physician then confirms the analysis, makes a diagnosis and recommends next steps in the patient’s care path within minutes. As the Arterys System acquires additional images, receives feedback and validation from physicians, it “learns” and tunes for more precise diagnostic decision support.
This novel ability to acquire, view, quantify and accurately assess cardiovascular disease from MR cardiovascular exams represents a significant step forward in MRI imaging,” said Ioannis Panagiotelis, PhD, chief marketing officer, Global MR at GE Healthcare. “We are excited to introduce this advancement for cardiac assessments with GE Healthcare MR systems.”
*Not yet commercially available
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