National Healthcare Group, a healthcare cluster covering central and northern Singapore, aims to integrate an AI assistant into its radiology workflow.
According to a media release, the group will be implementing South Korea-based Lunit's AI solution for chest X-ray analysis in its primary care diagnostic radiology systems.
Lunit INSIGHT CXR will be piloted at Geylang General Hospital for 10 months starting in October, with the results of the trial feeding into the full roll-out of the solution across the rest of NHG's general hospitals.
Why is this important?
Until recently, radiologists at NHG General Clinics manually reviewed, analysed and interpreted CXR images.
According to NHG, Lunit's AI solution will complement the growing number of CXR image analyses, which can quickly identify critical abnormalities in CXR images that indicate cardiac and pulmonary conditions.
“We believe that using Lunit INSIGHT CXR as a triage tool will enable NHG's GPs to manage patients more efficiently and reduce waiting times for discharge or referral to higher-acuity facilities,” said Dr Tan Cher Heng, Associate Professor and Chief Research and Innovation Officer at NHG.
The larger context
The introduction of AI will be through Singapore's national radiology AI platform, AimSG (Singapore's AI Medical Imaging Platform for Public Healthcare), funded by the Singapore National Health Innovation Centre.
Developed by Synapxe, NTT DATA and SingHealth, the vendor-neutral platform aims to enable public hospitals and healthcare facilities to deploy validated AI imaging solutions to improve diagnostic capabilities and efficiency.
AimSG initially helped Lunit integrate the same AI solution into the radiology workflow at Singapore General Hospital and Changi General Hospital.
In other related news, Runit signed a deal with Samsung Electronics earlier this year to integrate its AI CXR solutions into its premium X-ray product line. Runit's AI solutions support national cancer screening programs around the world and are increasingly being adopted by militaries in the Asia-Pacific region.
