Advances in cancer care such as immunotherapy promise greater success in treatment but also currently come with higher risks and uncertain outcomes.

GE Healthcare and Vanderbilt University Medical Center are partnering to develop AI applications which will examine anonymized patient data to help physicians determine better courses of treatment.

By retroactively analyzing demographic, genomic, tumor, cellular, proteomic and imaging data from anonymized patient records, these AI apps will assist clinicians in determining the best course of treatment for current and future patients.

“This partnership is a great example of the increasing convergence of the tools, technologies and data used by therapy innovators and healthcare providers," said Kieran Murphy, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, in a statement.

WHY IT MATTERS
Because immunotherapies are expensive and have the potential to cause damage if the wrong therapy is chosen, they are still associated with increased mortalities and cost.

Being able to make better informed decisions about the likelihood efficacy of a given treatment would enable doctors to lower costs and deliver greater outcomes for patients.

AI driven analysis and clinical decision support like this will drive a greater adoption of precision cancer treatment by more accurately predicting how a patient will react to a certain course of therapy.

THE LARGER TREND
AI is already being used to make sense of under analyzed health data. The insights it can glean by looking at a massive set of patient data can help inform personalized healthcare and lead health systems to better understand different treatment options work.

The promise of precision health data is great, but it's still often trapped in silos and it can be difficult to reconcile information. As more partnerships form around retroactively analyzing medical data and delivering AI-assisted clinical support, doctors will be able to make better decisions backed up by a wealth of newly-accessed information.

ON THE RECORD
"Immunotherapy offers tremendous promise but given the current unpredictability of some patients' reactions to treatments, it is also associated with increased morbidity and cost. This partnership provides the opportunity to leverage strengths of both of our organizations to further personalize cancer care by creating new tools that allow clinicians to more accurately predict how patients will respond to a specific therapy," said Dr. Jeff Balser, president and CEO of Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Benjamin Harris is a Maine-based freelance writer and and former new media producer for HIMSS Media.
Twitter: @BenzoHarris.