Leveraging AI and Medical Imaging, Turkish Experts Take on COVID-19 and Breast Cancer

When hospital emergency departments are busy, everyone benefits when patients are quickly diagnosed and treated. This is doubly so in the era of COVID-19, as the virus has kept many emergency departments busy day and night.

In Turkey, a distinguished group of clinicians, radiologists, software developers, senior data scientists and scientists from different disciplines, and GE Healthcare have announced the country’s first strategic collaboration to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) development in medical imaging.

The team will use GE Healthcare’s Edison Health Services to build software to detect, categorize, and grade the severity of COVID-19 disease in patients to help with diagnosis and treatment.

The University of Health Sciences Health Technopolis (TECHNOPOL)-based Curea team will be led by Professor Dr. Hakkı Muammer Karakas, M.D., Istanbul Provincial Health Directorate Radiology Services Coordinator & Health Sciences University Faculty member.

The possibilities for AI in healthcare are immense and extend far beyond COVID. The team led by Prof. Karakas will also use Edison Health Services for another project to auto-detect and categorize breast cancer through contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CESM).

This collaboration between Prof. Karakas and GE Healthcare will see Turkish clinical scientists, data scientists and software developers “harness our immense datasets to create AI-driven applications that can add significant value to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases in the Turkey. This is an organic tie-up that has the potential not only to establish Istanbul as a global site for AI development in healthcare, but the ability to scale up intelligent clinical analysis and operational management solutions and make them available to radiologists and healthcare professionals around the world,” said Prof. Dr. Karakas.

Nael Dabbagh, General Manager of GE Healthcare in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and Turkey, added, “It is a significant step forward in establishing an ecosystem for AI development in healthcare for Turkey and the whole region.”

Edison Health Services is an open, extensible, modern architecture for the development and deployment of digital applications in healthcare. Applications targeting clinical, operational, and financial outcomes in healthcare can easily be developed using these tools. 

What’s more, applications developed using Edison Health Services can be quickly and securely deployed in the cloud, on premises (e.g. via GE Healthcare’s Edison HealthLink appliance), or directly onto smart imaging devices.

Similar AI collaborations have also been announced like the recently launched EMEA Edison™ Accelerator, which is a start-up acceleration & healthcare provider collaboration program in Europe, Middle East & Africa, for the region and the world. It brings together healthcare providers interested in being at the forefront of innovation, and start-ups who want to leverage the GE Healthcare environment and mentoring to enhance their value proposition.