iCAD and Google Health partner to bring AI tech to breast cancer diagnosis

iCAD will incorporate Google Health's technology into its breast imaging solutions

A number of companies are incorporating artificial intelligence into cancer diagnosis, including PathologyWatch, Proscia, and Optellum, but it's not just startups that are getting on this space: Google Health has been working since at least 2018 to develop its own AI technology for breast cancer and personalized risk assessment. 

Now the company is ready to bring its technology to the commercial market, and to do so on Monday it announced a strategic development and commercialization agreement with iCAD, a company that develops and delivers cancer detection and radiation therapy solutions and services to enable clinicians to find and treat cancers.

With this agreement, the company will integrate Google Health’s mammography AI technology into its Breast AI Suite, which includes software solutions for breast tomosynthesis, breast density, risk assessment, and 2D mammography, offering clinicians tools for disease detection and analysis. This is is the first commercial partnership Google Health has entered into to introduce its breast imaging AI into clinical practice.

The company will also incorporate Google Health’s mammography AI technology into its ProFound AI Risk platform, its decision support tool that provides a personanalized breast cancer risk estimation, identifying people who are at a high risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer before or at their next screening by using information available in a screening mammogram.

Finally, on top of licensing Google Health’s mammography AI technology, iCAD will also use Google Cloud’s infrastructure to transform its delivery model, going from an on-premise suite of solutions to being cloud-hosted instead. That will allow the company to scale access to its technology.

In 2022, the American Cancer Society's estimates that about 287,850 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in women, around 51,400 new cases of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) will be diagnosed, and that about 43,250 women will die from breast cancer. While Deaths from breast cancer have declined, it still remains the second leading cause of cancer death among women overall and the leading cause of cancer death among Hispanic women.

The use of AI for diagnosing breast cancer has already shown positive results: test to evaluate the performance of an AI algorithm in mammograms found that AI alone had a higher rate of detecting cancer than radiologists, and when AI and radiologists were combined, the percentage of cancer found was 25 percentage points higher than radiologists alone.   

“Joining forces with Google marks a historic milestone for our Company, as leveraging Google’s world-class AI and Cloud technology elevates the caliber of our market-leading breast AI technologies and may also accelerate adoption and expand access on a global scale,” Stacey Stevens, President and CEO of iCAD, said in a statement.

"iCAD and Google Health are united in our purpose-driven missions to elevate innovation, improve patient care and optimize outcomes for all. By combining the power of our technologies and teams, we strengthen our fight against breast cancer and positively impact the lives of women and their loved ones across the globe.”

(Image source: icadmed.com)