Ibex Medical Analytics, a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cancer diagnostics, and Hartford HealthCare, a comprehensive and integrated healthcare system with more than 400 locations serving more than 17,000 people daily, have launched a clinical research and innovation initiative involving Ibex’s AI solution to help physicians deliver high-quality diagnosis and improved care for breast cancer patients.

Unfortunately, most people reading this know someone who has been affected by breast cancer. Whether it’s your mother, your sister, your wife, or your daughter, breast cancer is the most common malignant disease in women worldwide. So much so that there are more than two million new cases each year globally, and approximately one in eight American women is expected to develop invasive breast cancer throughout her lifetime. Even more unfortunate, is that the increase in the number of cancer cases simply continues to rise. As such, accurate and timely diagnosis is key to guiding treatment decisions and improving survival rates.

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that our healthcare systems are severely overwhelmed, and it is no different when cancer is the concern. With the growing number of cancer cases comes a growing workload for healthcare systems, especially in pathology labs. And so, there is a need for complementary clinical decision-support tools to help pathologists more rapidly and accurately detect cancer. Even though patients rarely interact with the pathologists examining their tissue samples, their interpretive expertise greatly affects the care and course of action taken; accurate and timely diagnosis is key to guiding treatment decisions and improving survival rates which is exactly what Ibex’s Galen™ Breast AI solution is trying to achieve.

Ibex’s Galen™ Breast supports pathologists by providing AI insights that help detect and grade different types of invasive and non-invasive breast cancer. The solution was developed by a team of pathologists, data scientists, and software engineers who implemented advanced deep learning technologies and trained algorithms on hundreds of thousands of image samples. Having already gone through multi-site, blinded clinical studies, the technology has proven to demonstrate very high accuracy levels. It is already in use around the world in everyday clinical practice for improving the quality of diagnosis, detecting diagnostic errors, and enhancing patient safety and experience. Their technology has the potential to support the traditional microscopic evaluation of cancers done by pathologists.

The partnership between Hartford HealthCare shows a true commitment of both parties to pursuing innovative new approaches to patient care. It also makes Hartford HealthCare among some of the first health organizations in America to use artificial intelligence technology to help pathologists with cancer diagnoses. Hartford HealthCare has begun using digital pathology (digitizing tissue sections on glass slides) with slide scanners, which Dr. Srini Mandavilli, Chief of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Hartford Hospital, said provides the material to be evaluated by AI technology. Then, using the AI as a sort of assistant, they are provided a higher safety net with minimal additional effort. As Joel Duckworth, Chief Revenue Officer at Ibex Medical Analytics said “We are proud to partner with Hartford HealthCare to support their ongoing digital transformation. We are committed to helping all our customers provide precise, timely, and personalized diagnoses to all patients. With Ibex’s trusted AI and advanced digital pathology technologies, Hartford HealthCare can empower its pathologists to deliver highly accurate and prompt diagnoses, with the potential to directly impact prognosis for patients, setting a new standard in breast cancer care quality in the United States.”