AWS introduces cloud-based HealthImaging

NEW YORK – AWS is excited to announce the general availability of AWS HealthImaging, a purpose-built service that helps builders develop cloud-native applications that store, analyze, and share medical imaging data at petabyte-scale. HealthImaging ingests data in the DICOM P10 format. It provides APIs for low-latency retrieval, and purpose-built storage.

“Our healthcare customers tell us they want their care teams to have the best medical imaging applications, and they want to reduce the complexity of managing infrastructure. Our research focused customers want to analyze imaging data at scale, and to accelerate collaboration and discovery across their organizations,” said Tehsin Syed (pictured), general manager, Health AI at AWS.

“Both of these customer groups express a desire to have all their organization’s medical imaging applications work from the same store of data,” Syed continued. “The cloud can help address these customer needs. With HealthImaging, builders, like AWS Partners who provide medical imaging applications and research solutions, can focus more on tackling these customer’s challenges, instead of worrying about infrastructure.”

Today, medical imaging is used to diagnose and monitor a wide range of health conditions, spanning oncology, trauma, stroke, and more. Globally, more than 3.6 billion medical imaging procedures are performed each year, collectively generating exabytes of medical imaging data.

The healthcare system is struggling to meet the growing demand for medical imaging procedures. Since 2008, the average number of imaging procedures assigned to radiologists in the US has increased from 58 per day to 100 per day. In that same period, the typical imaging study size doubled to nearly 150 MB. As a result, radiologists need new technologies to increase productivity, and AI is increasingly being used to streamline cognitively taxing workflows and minimize errors.

Healthcare provider IT groups are often responsible for the infrastructure that hosts new and archived medical imaging studies. These organizations are managing rapidly growing imaging archives, typically on-premises. They see infrastructure consuming considerable square footage, IT staff, and operational budgets.

They also manage a growing array of enterprise applications that require access to the same medical images, each with different latency and resolution needs. This results in their storing several cached copies of each image for various applications, plus additional copies for long-term storage. Consequently, they see higher storage costs due to data duplication, and uncertainty around which version of an image is authoritative.

Collaborations across care teams and research groups can lead to still more copies of data. Care teams typically require fully identified data, whereas teams building AI models may prefer to use de-identified data. With traditional on-premises architectures, customers may need to make additional copies of data for each use case, resulting in higher storage costs and greater operational complexity. The expansion of medical imaging has created vast data sets that can be used to develop new language and computer vision AI models. Yet legacy data silos impede innovation by limiting researcher’s access to data.

HealthImaging provides a purpose-built medical imaging data store that simplifies provisioning infrastructure, giving customers more time to care for patients and perform research. With HealthImaging, all the applications across an organization can access a single authoritative copy of data without duplication, and users can securely access the data from anywhere. With just a few clicks in the HealthImaging console, you can provision a data store capable of hosting petabytes of medical imaging data, maintaining every image ready for low-latency retrieval. Further, HealthImaging reduces the amount of infrastructure required to operate enterprise imaging solutions, and that helps you save cost and reduce operational complexity.

Customers can use applications built on HealthImaging to take advantage of low storage costs for image archives, without worrying about hardware refresh cycles or capacity planning. As new data is generated by imaging modalities, it can be imported to HealthImaging and be immediately available for retrieval by diagnostic applications like PACS (picture archiving and communication systems). AWS DataSync, AWS Direct Connect, and purpose-built gateways from AWS partners can simplify moving data from the edge to the cloud.