Microsoft announced it is partnering with Mass General Brigham, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and its health system UW Health to research and innovate advanced radiology-focused multimodal AI foundation models and develop medical imaging copilot applications.

Mass General Brigham, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and UW Health will work with Microsoft to explore how applications and algorithms can help radiologists interpret medical images, generate reports, analyze data and classify disease. 

The partners will explore deploying real-world use cases in clinical workflows, including through Microsoft’s Nuance’s PowerScribe radiology reporting platform, and create various medical imaging applications. 

The applications will be built on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform and extend Microsoft’s Nuance radiology applications. 

“Generative AI has transformative potential to overcome traditional barriers in AI product development and to accelerate the impact of these technologies on clinical care. As healthcare leaders, we need to carefully and responsibly develop and evaluate such tools to ensure high-quality care is in no way compromised,” Dr. Keith J. Dreyer, chief data science officer and chief imaging officer at Mass General Brigham and leader of the Mass General Brigham AI business, said in a statement. 

“Foundation models fine-tuned on Mass General Brigham’s vast multimodal longitudinal data assets can enable a shorter development cycle of AI/ML-based software as a medical device and other clinical applications, for example, to automate the segmentation of organs and abnormalities in medical imaging and increase radiologists’ efficiency and consistency.”

THE LARGER TREND

Mass General Brigham experienced disruptions to its system after a misconfigured CrowdStrike Falcon update was pushed to Windows on Friday, causing a worldwide IT outage.

Although the health system was able to remain open during the outage and provide care to patients with urgent health concerns in the group’s clinics and emergency departments, it had to cancel non-urgent surgeries and medical visits on the day of the outage.

The radiology-focused partnership mentioned above is not the first time the health system has collaborated with Microsoft and UW Health to examine AI use in healthcare.

At HIMSS24 in March, Microsoft announced the launch of the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), a consortium aimed at operationalizing responsible AI principles to ensure safety, quality and trustworthy AI use in healthcare. 

The consortium includes Microsoft as the technology-enabling partner and 16 health systems, including UW School of Medicine and Public Health and Mass General Brigham.

Other members include AdventHealth, Advocate Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Duke Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, MedStar Health, Mercy, Mount Sinai Health System, Northwestern Medicine, Providence, Sharp HealthCare, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

In April, fellow tech giant Google Cloud and global enterprise Bayer announced a partnership to develop AI applications aimed at reducing radiologist burnout and increasing efficiencies in diagnoses.  

The collaboration intended to help organizations build scalable and compliant AI-enabled software for medical imaging while ensuring data security.

The HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum is scheduled to take place September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register.