Bayer and Google Cloud to accelerate development of AI-powered healthcare applications for radiologists

Bayer and Google Cloud today announced a collaboration on the development of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to support radiologists and ultimately better serve patients. As part of the collaboration, Bayer will further develop its innovation platform to accelerate the development and deployment of AI-powered healthcare applications with a clear focus on radiology, using Google Cloud’s technology, including its generative AI (gen AI) tools. The collaboration aims to help organizations overcome many of the challenges to building scalable and compliant AI-powered medical imaging software products using leading data security capabilities and accelerate the development of potentially groundbreaking and impactful solutions that ultimately benefit patients.

“Radiology plays a vital role in healthcare, and the need to efficiently and accurately uncover insights and deliver solutions at scale that can improve patient outcomes has never been greater,” said Nelson Ambrogio, President, Radiology at Bayer. “Bayer has a heritage in radiology with decades of contributions to radiological research and innovation. Through the collaboration with Google Cloud, our joint efforts will help organizations in the healthcare and life science industry transform the growing amounts of data into valuable and impactful insights, saving radiologists time and helping them optimize their important work for the benefit of patients.”

“Radiologists and other clinicians face burnout due to the sheer volume of work they face every day. Gen AI can help tackle repetitive tasks and provide insights into massive data sets, saving valuable time and helping to positively impact patient outcomes,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “We look forward to our continued collaboration with Bayer as it shapes the future of diagnostics and helps its customers deliver insights to patients with greater accuracy and speed.”

Medical imaging data accounts for about 90 percent of all healthcare data, and it is a highly complex and rich clinical data modality and a very critical tool used to diagnose patients.

Billions of medical images get scanned globally each year and this number continues to grow increasing the workload for radiologists and other healthcare professionals tasked with handling and interpreting these images for clinicians and patients. Many new supportive AI-tools need to be developed and maintained to handle and analyze this enormous amount of data efficiently.

Bayer’s innovation platform provides a cloud-native pipeline from product idea to launch:

• Analyze and experiment: The users will be able to uncover insights with AI-powered data analysis, and help design breakthrough healthcare solutions by accessing a data ecosystem, as well as using intelligent search and data preparation capabilities. In addition, users will have the ability to explore and extract information from regulations and scientific papers, all within a collaboration platform with leading data security capabilities.
• Build and validate: Developers will also be able to scale and engineer solutions using gen AI assistance for ideation, development, validation and lifecycle management; generate documents in alignment with healthcare requirements to aid in gaining regulatory approval; leverage medical imaging core lab services from Bayer for clinical performance evaluation.
• Launch and monitor: Healthcare and life science companies will be able to deploy AI medical solutions standardized for flexible integration across compatible healthcare systems; and analyze field data for insights, bias detection, and continuous improvement.

The platform is built on Google Cloud and uses tools like Vertex AI, BigQuery, Healthcare API and Chronicle. Bayer’s platform is designed to help bring innovative medical imaging tools to market faster and more cost-effective, and a first version for extended testing is planned to be made available later this year in the EU and US.

The pairing of Bayer’s deep radiology, healthcare regulatory and clinical data handling expertise with Google’s technology leadership in gen AI and other fields has the potential to significantly impact the healthcare ecosystem, by improving patient outcomes, reducing costs, and accelerating the pace of innovation.

The expanded collaboration on the new innovation platform builds upon the long-standing partnership between Bayer and Google Cloud across a wide range of technologies and efforts, including accelerating drug discovery and supporting patient diagnosis. Bayer and Google Cloud are also working together to transform patient care worldwide through responsible AI adoption.

About Data Privacy and Security

Life Science companies need to meet strict data security, compliance, and privacy standards to manage sensitive and proprietary data at a large scale. Google Cloud’s leading security capabilities, such as those from Chronicle and Mandiant, can help customers centrally manage, monitor, and govern their data, helping them ensure data quality, accuracy, and consistency. In addition, Google Cloud’s customers retain control over their data. In healthcare settings, access and use of patient data is protected through the implementation of Google Cloud’s infrastructure and data storage capabilities that support the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, along with each customer’s security and privacy controls.

About Radiology at Bayer

As a true life-science company with a heritage of over 100 years in radiology, Bayer is committed to providing excellence – from innovative products to high-quality services – to support efficient and optimized patient care. Bayer offers a leading portfolio of contrast media for computed tomography (CT), X-ray, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), along with devices for their precise administration, informatics solutions, and a medical imaging platform delivering access to applications, including those enabled by AI. Bayer’s radiology products generated about €2bn sales in 2023. Bayer is highly committed to research and development, which includes leveraging AI and driving innovation in medical imaging.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, gen AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

About Bayer

Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of health care and nutrition. In line with its mission, “Health for all, Hunger for none,” the company’s products and services are designed to help people and the planet thrive by supporting efforts to master the major challenges presented by a growing and aging global population. Bayer is committed to driving sustainable development and generating a positive impact with its businesses. At the same time, the Group aims to increase its earning power and create value through innovation and growth. The Bayer brand stands for trust, reliability and quality throughout the world. In fiscal 2023, the Group employed around 100,000 people and had sales of 47.6 billion euros. R&D expenses before special items amounted to 5.8 billion euros. For more information, go to www.bayer.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This release may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by Bayer management. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. These factors include those discussed in Bayer’s public reports which are available on the Bayer website at www.bayer.com. The company assumes no liability whatsoever to update these forward-looking statements or to conform them to future events or developments.

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