GE Healthcare and SOPHiA GENETICS are aiming to personalize cancer care through a combination of medical imaging, AI and genomics.

The two will work together to better target and match treatments to individual patients, based on their genomic profile and cancer type. To do this, they are pairing GE’s medical imaging and monitoring technologies and its Edison platform with the SOPHiA DDM cloud-based software-as-a-service analytics genomic insights platform.

"Genomics is a crucial aspect of screening for cancer type and determining the right treatment. We are aligned with Sophia in the vision of harnessing the power of genomic analytics to help clinicians improve outcomes for their patients while making it easier and simpler to draw insights from increasingly complicated and numerous sets of diagnostic data," Jan Makela, president and CEO of imaging at GE Healthcare, told HCB News.
As part of the collaboration, GE will deploy a range of imaging modalities on its Edison platform, including CT, MR, X-ray, mammography, ultrasound and PET. The Edison platform integrates data from diverse sources such as EHRs, radiology information systems, imaging and other medical devices. The data is then used to develop and deploy AI-enabled solutions that simplify oncology patient workflows and help assess and compare increasingly complex clinical patient data. SOPHiA DDM also uses AI and machine learning to create actionable insights from complex multimodal data sets.

Together, the two platforms are expected to eliminate data silos across equipment and sites that delay or even prevent patients from getting the most appropriate treatment for cancer and other diseases. The companies hope to create greater access to data-driven medicine for both clinical practice and clinical trials, as well as next-generation sequencing, a growing area in cancer diagnostics that utilizes genomic information to create personalized treatment. This, they say, will help to standardize data and improve the quality of care through the digitization of the patient's journey in oncology.

"It can be difficult for clinicians to easily and quickly obtain the information they need to prescribe the right therapies for each patient," said Makela. "With our collaboration, we hope to change that by combining our efforts around rapid diagnosis with the ability to support identification of the right therapy for every patient. We are working toward a solution that fits seamlessly into providers’ digital workflows."

Jurgi Camblong, co-founder and CEO of SOPHiA GENETICS, added in a statement that its partnership with GE will enable "cancer patients ... to receive equal access to better diagnoses and treatments through secure data pooling and knowledge sharing, unlocking the promise of data-driven medicine at scale."

CT Homepage