Philips is teaming up with Korean firms Lunit and Vuno to work on AI for healthcare, according to the Korea Biomedical Review.

Vuno CEO Lee Ye-ha, Philips Korea CEO Kim Dong-hee and Lunit CEO Suh Beom-seok made the announcement at the Philips Seoul HQ Wednesday, according to the news site.

“We will actively share our advanced technology and know-how with medical staff and local healthcare AI development companies to develop solutions that will lead the global healthcare AI field,” Philips Korea CEO Kim Dong-hee said at the time. “The company hopes that this cooperation agreement will help Korea to strengthen its global competitiveness in the healthcare AI field.”

Philips will make its AI open research platform IntelliSpace Discovery available to aid in the effort.

The agreement will have all three firms work on AI solutions focusing on Korean technology and then commercialize the results both for use in Korea and globally.

In December, 2018, Phillips launched the IntelliSpace Discovery 3.0 research platform. It uses the Philips HealthSuite, an open platform that provides radiologists with data analytics in medical imaging and enables AI-based solutions to support radiologists in their clinical and translational research.

“We use IntelliSpace Discovery to bring our research activities to the next level. Everybody is talking about Artificial Intelligence. We are making our own deep learning AI algorithms,” Professor David Maintz, head of the Department of Radiology of the University Hospital Cologne in Germany, noted at the time.

The components of IntelliSpace Discovery include:

-Front End Applications – these integrate with existing clinical software and are vendor-agnostic.
-Study Management – the infrastructure has a vendor-neutral archive for structured and unstructured data.
-Machine Learning – the data can be batch processed in a high-performance computing setting.
-Clinical Research – AI capabilities include multi-parametric enablement, segmentation and annotation, tumor quantification and stratification, deep learning networks and classification.
-Research Services – it is possible to access Philips R&D for additional services including consulting and development.

“Together with our customers we’re enabling research in adaptive intelligence with the goal to create solutions that augment healthcare professionals and improve patient care and efficiencies of care delivery, both inside and outside of the hospital,” Jeroen Tas, chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips, said at the time. “AI is the connective tissue to seamlessly integrate data and technology to enable precision diagnosis.”

Lunit was in the news earlier in January when its INSIGHT AI – a deep learning-based technology for evaluating diagnostic images – began testing at medical institutions in Korea.

Early clinical trial results have shown that the Lunit INSIGHT data-driven imaging biomarker (DIB) technology raised diagnostic accuracy by 14 percent.

The technology analyzes existing X-ray images looking for major lung diseases, including lung cancer, pneumonia, pneumothorax and tuberculosis. Results can be generated a few seconds after the images are uploaded.

"Currently, DIB technology has achieved an accuracy level comparable to that of human experts," Anthony Paek, CEO of Lunit, said in a statement. "In the future, however, we will have new DIB technologies capable of outperforming humans."

In October, 2018, Vuno announced that it was beginning clinical trials at the Asan Medical Center of its cardiac arrest AI detection tool, DEWS, with plans, should final trials succeed, to make it commercially available in May of 2019.

DEWS can predict the onset of cardiac arrest symptoms 24 hours in advance using blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and temperature – along with deep learning technology.

Once the software is approved, it will be the world's first cardiac arrest prediction tool.