GE Healthcare and Optellum today announced that they have signed a letter of intent to collaborate to advance precision diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. GE Healthcare is a provider in medical imaging solutions. Optellum is a provider in AI decision support for the early diagnosis and optimal treatment of lung cancer.
Together, the companies are seeking to address one of the largest challenges in the diagnosis of lung cancer, helping providers to determine the malignancy of a lung nodule: a suspicious lesion that may be benign or cancerous. The majority of incidentally detected pulmonary nodules present an indeterminate cancer risk, and are incredibly challenging for clinicians to diagnose and manage, leading to delayed treatment for cancer patients and invasive procedures on healthy people.
Optellum’s Virtual Nodule Clinic identifies and scores the probability of malignancy in a lung nodule, which is key to determining whether biopsy is necessary, and accelerating diagnosis. It is the only FDA-cleared AI-assisted diagnosis software for early-stage lung cancer1, and has been shown to improve the sensitivity and specificity of malignancy assessments of indeterminate nodules 2 — enabling pulmonologists and radiologists to make optimal clinical decisions3.
The clinician’s AI-assisted diagnosis of malignancy may enable patients whose nodules are not malignant to avoid unnecessary and aggressive procedures such as biopsy and surgical resection, while expediting the diagnostic process, and enabling the right treatment to start earlier. This has the potential to provide patients with personalized diagnosis and treatment plans, enabling lung cancer patients to be treated at the earliest possible stage when survival rates are the highest.
GE plans to collaborate with Optellum’s sales team on the distribution of the Virtual Nodule Clinic and work with Optellum to integrate the platform with AI solutions powered by GE Healthcare’s Edison platform. In addition the companies intend to bring results from Optellum’s Lung Cancer Prediction AI into the existing workflow of various GE Healthcare technological pathways, including CT and PACS.
“The precise diagnosis of lung cancer can greatly improve patient prognosis,” said Ben Newton, General Manager, Oncology Solutions, at GE Healthcare. “The integration of imaging and medical device data from the Edison Platform with AI-enabled solutions like the one offered by the Optellum Virtual Nodule Clinic has the potential to streamline clinician workflows and advance our goal of making precision healthcare, taking the right action at the right time for every patient, at scale, as widely accessible as possible.”
“This collaboration is a major step forward for Optellum and the field of thoracic oncology at large,” commented Václav Potěšil, PhD, Founder and Chief Business Officer of Optellum. “GE’s vast clinical network can accelerate deployment of Optellum’s platform and could enable a revolutionary redefinition of early lung cancer treatment for clinicians and patients around the world.”
About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare is the $17 billion* healthcare business of GE (NYSE: GE). As a leading global medical technology, pharmaceutical diagnostics and digital solutions innovator, GE Healthcare enables clinicians to make faster, more informed decisions through intelligent devices, data analytics, applications and services, supported by its Edison intelligence platform. With over 100 years of healthcare industry experience and around 47,000 employees globally, the company operates at the center of an ecosystem working toward precision health, digitizing healthcare, helping drive productivity and improve outcomes for patients, providers, health systems and researchers around the world.
*excludes Biopharma
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About Optellum
Optellum is a commercial-stage lung health company providing Artificial Intelligence decision support software that assists physicians in early diagnosis and optimal treatment for their patients. The company was founded so that every lung disease patient is diagnosed and treated at the earliest possible stage, when chances of cure are the highest. Optellum’s roadmap extends beyond lung cancer diagnosis and treatment to other deadly diseases of the lungs, including interstitial lung disease (ILD) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Optellum has headquarters at the Oxford Centre for Innovation in Oxford, United Kingdom and a U.S. office at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, TX.
For more information, visit optellum.com, or follow us LinkedIn and Twitter.
1EIT Health https://eithealth.eu/news-article/eit-health-supported-optellum-marks-ai-world-first/
2 Massion PP, Antic S, Ather S, et al. Assessing the Accuracy of a Deep Learning Method to Risk Stratify Indeterminate Pulmonary Nodules. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2020 Jul 15;202(2):241-249. https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201903-0505OC
3Vachani A, Massion P, Munden R, Gleeson F, Bellinger C, Dotson T, Freitag L, Imaging AI/”Radiomics” decision support improves physicians’ stratification of indeterminate pulmonary nodules: A Multiple-Reader Multiple-Case study presented to The ACS National Lung Cancer Roundtable (NLCRT) 2020.
