Royal Philips announces the release of IntelliSpace Discovery 3.0—a comprehensive, open platform to enable the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) assets in radiology with the aim to support radiologists in their clinical and translational research. This technology is currently on display at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Solutions that leverage AI have the potential to improve patient care and increase the efficiency of care delivery, Philips officials say. However, there are challenges when it comes to introducing AI into healthcare clinical practice. Health systems are consistently faced with questions on how to collect and prepare high-quality data, which methods of training and validating the tools are most appropriate, and how to deploy AI without disruption.

IntelliSpace Discovery is already being used by more than 50 hospitals and academic institutions worldwide for the development of radiology applications for rendering, segmentation, and quantification. For example, it is being used for research and clinical validation, and subsequently the tools/applications can be deployed into the radiology workflow on the Philips IntelliSpace Portal.

With the introduction of IntelliSpace Discovery 3.0, the platform now provides research applications and tools for radiologists to aggregate, normalize, and anonymize data, which can be visualized and annotated to ‘train’ and validate deep learning algorithms. They can then deploy these algorithms as plug-in apps into the research workflow to analyze new datasets and help facilitate clinical research in radiology, oncology, neurology, and cardiology.

“We use IntelliSpace Discovery to bring our research activities to the next level. Everybody is talking about artificial intelligence. We are making our own deep learning AI algorithms,” says Professor David Maintz, head of the department of radiology of the University Hospital Cologne in Germany.

Jeroen Tas, chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips, also spoke out about the technology, saying: “Together with our customers, we’re enabling research in adaptive intelligence with the goal to create solutions that augment healthcare professionals and improve patient care and efficiencies of care delivery, both inside and outside of the hospital. AI is the connective tissue to seamlessly integrate data and technology to enable precision diagnosis.

“At RSNA 2018, we’re showing how AI is laying the foundations for solutions of the future,” Tas adds.

IntelliSpace Discovery includes:

  • Front end applications: Integration with existing clinical infrastructure provides streamlined access to vendor-agnostic and multimodality data-sets, and research advanced visualization tools allow data to be prepared and processed for AI training with existing AI tools.
  • Study management: Fully scalable infrastructure contains a vendor-neutral research archive for structured and unstructured data, used to upload and process data.
  • Machine learning: Research data and deployment platform obtains batch processing in a scalable high-performance computing environment to support iterative development and validation.
  • Clinical research: AI assets and capabilities include multi-parametric enablement, segmentation and annotation, tumor quantification and stratification, deep learning networks, and classification.
  • Research services: Accessibility to Philips R&D for a range of services from consultancy to development.