New Amazon HealthLake capabilities enable next-generation imaging solutions and precision health analytics

At AWS, we have been investing in healthcare since Day 1 with customers including Moderna, Rush University Medical Center, and the NHS who have built breakthrough innovations in the cloud. From developing public health analytics hubs, to improving health equity and patient outcomes, to developing a COVID-19 vaccine in just 65 days, our customers are utilizing machine learning (ML) and the cloud to address some of healthcare’s biggest challenges and drive change toward more predictive and personalized care.

Last year, we launched Amazon HealthLake, a purpose-built service to store, transform, and query health data in the cloud, allowing you to benefit from a complete view of individual or patient population health data at scale.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of two new capabilities in HealthLake that deliver innovations for medical imaging and analytics.

Amazon HealthLake Imaging

Healthcare professionals face a myriad of challenges as the scale and complexity of medical imaging data continues to increase including the following:

• The volume of medical imaging data has continued to accelerate over the past decade with over 5.5 billion imaging procedures done across the globe each year by a shrinking number of radiologists
• The average imaging study size has doubled over the past decade to 150 MB as more advanced imaging procedures are being performed due to improvements in resolution and the increasing use of volumetric imaging
• Health systems store multiple copies of the same imaging data in clinical and research systems, which leads to increased costs and complexity
• It can be difficult to structure this data, which often takes data scientists and researchers weeks or months to derive important insights with advanced analytics and ML

These compounding factors are slowing down decision-making, which can affect care delivery. To address these challenges, we are excited to announce the preview of Amazon HealthLake Imaging, a new HIPAA-eligible capability that makes it easy to store, access, and analyze medical images at petabyte scale. This new capability is designed for fast, sub-second  medical image retrieval in your clinical workflows that you can access securely from anywhere (e.g., web, desktop, phone) and with high availability. Additionally, you can drive your existing medical viewers and analysis applications from a single encrypted copy of the same data in the cloud with normalized metadata and advanced compression. As a result, it is estimated that HealthLake Imaging helps you reduce the total cost of medical imaging storage by up to 40%.

We are proud to be working with partners on the launch of HealthLake Imaging to accelerate adoption of cloud-native solutions to help transition enterprise imaging workflows to the cloud and accelerate your pace of innovation.

Intelerad and Arterys are among the launch partners utilizing HealthLake Imaging to achieve higher scalability and viewing performance for their next-generation PACS systems and AI platform, respectively. Radical Imaging is providing customers with zero-footprint, cloud-capable medical imaging applications using open-source projects, such as OHIF or Cornerstone.js, built on HealthLake Imaging APIs. And NVIDIA has collaborated with AWS to develop a MONAI connector for HealthLake Imaging. MONAI is an open-source medical AI framework to develop and deploy models into AI applications, at scale.

“Intelerad has always focused on solving complex problems in healthcare, while enabling our customers to grow and provide exceptional patient care to more patients around the globe. In our continuous path of innovation, our collaboration with AWS, including leveraging Amazon HealthLake Imaging, allows us to innovate more quickly and reduce complexity while offering unparalleled scale and performance for our users.”

— AJ Watson, Chief Product Officer at Intelerad Medical Systems

“With Amazon HealthLake Imaging, Arterys was able to achieve noticeable improvements in performance and responsiveness of our applications, and with a rich feature set of future-looking enhancements, offers benefits and value that will enhance solutions looking to drive future-looking value out of imaging data.”

— Richard Moss, Director of Product Management at Arterys

Radboudumc and the University of Maryland Medical Intelligent Imaging Center (UM2ii) are among the customers utilizing HealthLake Imaging to improve the availability of medical images and utilize image streaming.

“At Radboud University Medical Center, our mission is to be a pioneer in shaping a more person-centered, innovative future of healthcare. We are building a collaborative AI solution with Amazon HealthLake Imaging for clinicians and researchers to speed up innovation by putting ML algorithms into the hands of clinicians faster.”

— Bram van Ginneken, Chair, Diagnostic Image Analysis Group at Radboudumc

“UM2ii was formed to unite innovators, thought leaders, and scientists across academics and industry. Our work with AWS will accelerate our mission to push the boundaries of medical imaging AI. We are excited to build the next generation of cloud-based intelligent imaging with Amazon HealthLake Imaging and AWS’s experience with scalability, performance, and reliability.”

— Paul Yi, Director at UM2ii

Amazon HealthLake Analytics

The second capability we’re excited to announce is Amazon HealthLake Analytics. Harnessing multi-modal data, which is highly contextual and complex, is key to making meaningful progress in providing patients highly personalized and precisely targeted diagnostics and treatments.

HealthLake Analytics makes it easy to query and derive insights from multi-modal health data at scale, at the individual or population levels, with the ability to share data securely across the enterprise and enable advanced analytics and ML in just a few clicks. This removes the need for you to execute complex data exports and data transformations.

HealthLake Analytics automatically normalizes raw health data from multiple disparate sources (e.g. medical records, health insurance claims, EHRs, medical devices) into an analytics and interoperability-ready format in a matter of minutes. Integration with other AWS services makes it easy to query the data with SQL using Amazon Athena, as well as share and analyze data to enable advanced analytics and ML. You can create powerful dashboards with Amazon QuickSight for care gap analyses and disease management of an entire patient population. Or you can build and train many ML models quickly and efficiently in Amazon SageMaker for AI-driven predictions, such as risk of hospital readmission or overall effectiveness of a line of treatment. HealthLake Analytics reduces what would take months of engineering effort and allows you to do what you do best—deliver care for patients.

Conclusion

At AWS, our goal is to support you to deliver convenient, personalized, and high-value care – helping you to reinvent how you collaborate, make data-driven clinical and operational decisions, enable precision medicine, accelerate therapy development, and decrease the cost of care.

With these new capabilities in Amazon HealthLake, we along with our partners can help enable next-generation imaging workflows in the cloud and derive insights from multi-modal health data, while complying with HIPAA, GDPR, and other regulations.

To learn more and get started, refer to Amazon HealthLake Analytics and Amazon HealthLake Imaging.

About the authors

Tehsin Syed is General Manager of Health AI at Amazon Web Services, and leads our Health AI engineering and product development efforts including Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon Health. Tehsin works with teams across Amazon Web Services responsible for engineering, science, product and technology to develop ground breaking healthcare and life science AI solutions and products. Prior to his work at AWS, Tehsin was Vice President of engineering at Cerner Corporation where he spent 23 years at the intersection of healthcare and technology.

Dr. Taha Kass-Hout is Vice President, Machine Learning, and Chief Medical Officer at Amazon Web Services, and leads our Health AI strategy and efforts, including Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon HealthLake. He works with teams at Amazon responsible for developing the science, technology, and scale for COVID-19 lab testing, including Amazon’s first FDA authorization for testing our associates—now offered to the public for at-home testing. A physician and bioinformatician, Taha served two terms under President Obama, including the first Chief Health Informatics officer at the FDA. During this time as a public servant, he pioneered the use of emerging technologies and the cloud (the CDC’s electronic disease surveillance), and established widely accessible global data sharing platforms: the openFDA, which enabled researchers and the public to search and analyze adverse event data, and precisionFDA (part of the Presidential Precision Medicine initiative).