In the latest effort aimed at better management and analysis of medical images, Israel's Zebra Medical Vision and Dell Services are collaborating to offer algorithm-based image analysis for healthcare providers.
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| Dell CEO Michael Dell |
For its part, Dell Services already has more than 1,100 healthcare providers that use its cloud archive services for their medical services. Now, those customers will be able to receive automated, imaging based analysis provided by Zebra Medical that's aimed at offering insights that will improve preventative care and population risk management.
In a keynote address at the ongoing HIMSS conference in Las Vegas, Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell commented on large scale healthcare analytics efforts, saying "all this information needs to be translated into better patient outcomes and better patient success."
Zebra's analytics platform will be offered at any of Dell's clinical sites to offer algorithms that provide screening and diagnostic decision support. These can be used to create disease-based risk profiles, as well as to identify patients who could benefit from preventative care and wellness programs. It's expected to help healthcare providers more easily identify patients at risk for osteoporosis, emphysema, cardiac disease, liver disease and other indications that are more effectively treated when discovered early.
"Big Data, non-imaging analytics are already providing great value to the healthcare system," said Zebra Medical co-founder and CEO Elad Benjamin. "Using the vast amounts of imaging data available and the best machine learning and computer vision tools, the analytics platform will unlock medical insights that will allow early detection and treatment of some of the most debilitating and costly diseases. Our partnership will help providers take the leap to preventative care in a cost effective and seamless manner."
The pair originally disclosed a multi-year partnership last November. There are a number of companies, including Royal Philips ($PHG) and IBM Watson Health ($IBM), that also are aggressively pursuing the improved management and machine learning analytics of medical images. But it still remains to be seen how useful these tools will become to healthcare providers when it comes to routine patient care.
In a separate, but related announcement, Dell said its Cloud Clinical Archive Services can now be used to manage genomics data.
- here is the Zebra announcement
- and here is the genomics release