General Electric Co.’s healthcare business is teaming up with chipmakers Nvidia Corp. and Intel Corp. to speed up the time it takes to process medical images by taking advantage of their latest artificial intelligence systems and graphics processing unit chips.

GE Healthcare said on Sunday it’s partnering with Nvidia to update more than 500,000 medical imaging devices it owns worldwide with its new Revolution Frontier CT system, which it claims can process images up to two times faster than existing technology. According to GE, Revolution Frontier is also much better at detecting medical problems such as liver lesions and kidney lesions, and can therefore reduce the number of follow-up appointments and non-interpretable scans.

GE Healthcare also announced it will begin using NVIDIA’s GPU Cloud, which provides AI-based analytics services for medical practitioners to help with things such as diagnosis.

The industrial giant said the innovations are necessary because the vast majority of medical data remains unused. According to GE’s stats, the average hospital generates about 50 petabytes of data per year, but only 3 percent of it is actually used by medical staff to help patients.

“Healthcare is changing at remarkable speed, and the technologies that will transform the industry should reflect that pace,” said Kieran Murphy, president and chief executive officer of GE Healthcare.

GE Healthcare also said it’s extending a partnership with Nvidia’s chipmaking rival Intel to speed up the processing of some medical images. In this second announcement, the company said it would leverage Intel’s latest Xeon Scalable chips in order to process images for radiologists faster.

“Radiologist workdays can be enhanced by use of real-time data analytics and increased performance,” said Jonathan Ballon, vice president of Intel’s Internet of Things Group.

GE’s unit will also create a new Joint Performance Acceleration Lab with Intel. Based in Chicago, the lab will be used for research purposes in the imaging field, leveraging Intel’s Wind River virtualization technology and network edge devices used in hospitals across the U.S.

Image: GE Healthcare