From the November 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

For AI vendors, such partnerships will allow access to a significant user base and power further innovation for these applications. However, AI vendors should not put their entire focus on tight integration with a single vendor, as enterprise imaging or PACS vendors outside their clinical specialty will also request their presence in other marketplaces, which could add an additional revenue stream and broader distribution channels.

Most AV vendors are currently focusing more on AI providing improved automatic segmentation and quantification to refine their solutions, building these in-house or through OEM partnerships and incorporating them completely into the existing software; but tight integration into the AV software hasn’t had much attention yet. A number of UV vendors are looking at integrating AI into their software, as in the longer term a demand for this could arise from the small to midsize provider segment.


Marketplaces will continue to develop in the short- to mid-term. While direct integration will be in focus for best-of-breed solutions within each clinical subject, marketplaces will increasingly be used for lower volume AI applications, and for getting the algorithms out to a broader audience. We will see the term marketplace being adopted by multiple vendors, even those with a very limited number of available algorithms. However, these marketplaces will evolve over time to include third party algorithms as well. Marketplaces will continue to be distributed through cloud for easy access and transition to OpEx business models such as volume-based pricing or SaaS.

Longer term
In the longer term, best-of-breed integration will become tighter, with algorithms not only being in the same user interface, but in the same view, as we see with automatic segmentation and measurement tools in AV today. Accompanying this will be an industry consolidation where some of the AI tool companies within the main clinical subjects will be acquired by PACS or enterprise imaging vendors, often after long-standing partnerships.

Marketplaces will continue to be cloud-based, but with a bigger role for public cloud hosting companies. Traditional PACS-based analysis software will transition to thin-client with a proportion of the archiving on public cloud. As this will depend on regulations and local cloud readiness, it will happen at different rates country to country, with the U.S. leading the way. Looking even further ahead, this development in deployment models may lead to competition from vendors not traditionally associated with healthcare, as the cloud hosting vendors already hosting and computing the analysis may look into building their own AI algorithms. However, as AI becomes increasingly integrated into radiology solutions, these AI algorithms will add to the existing offerings but not cause dramatic changes in the market dynamics for PACS and enterprise imaging vendors.

November 2018 Magazine

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