Siemens Healthineers is launching artificial intelligence-enabled services to help healthcare providers address a range of challenges from hands-on image interpretation to complex scenario planning for entire healthcare environments. The company’s new radiology services suite1 is designed to span the imaging chain from scheduling to image-generation to reporting. It bundles existing services and new ones like the AI-Enablement Services that can provide radiologists with custom-built summaries of clinically relevant observations, saving time in annotation of images and creation of reports. The new offerings will be presented at the 2025 Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago.
With increasing demand for diagnostic imaging and a shortage of specialists, pressure on existing staff is growing and patients are having to wait longer for appointments and results. To reduce the burden on radiology teams while helping them work more efficiently, the new, scanner-technology agnostic services suite is designed to comprehensively support radiologists by taking over some of the more mundane processes. In this way, it can help mitigate the effects of staff shortages and reduce radiologist burnout. Pilot projects have shown that by using the new AI-enabled solution, radiologists were able to annotate Chest CT images up to 25 percent faster and experienced noticeably less cognitive load.2 The clinical accuracy of the results remained at the same high level.²
“It is very similar to having a resident clinician drafting cases to you, with the tedious work already completed when you open a case. This allows you to move more efficiently through cases and decreases cognitive load,” said William Baughman, MD, radiologist at The MetroHealth System, a nonprofit, public health system in Cleveland, USA, who has already tested the AI offering with his team.
The new AI-Enablement Services are an important component of the Siemens Healthineers radiology services suite, which also includes existing services for remote scanning and reading. Customers can thus obtain support from medical-technical radiologists during image acquisition with magnetic resonance imaging through Remote Scanning Services. If customers need support for the generation of the final report, they can also leverage external expertise through Remote Reading Services, carried out by licensed radiologists from external partner organisations of Siemens Healthineers. In this way, radiology departments can better address staff shortages and organise shifts more flexibly while maintaining standards of care for patients. Siemens Healthineers is already working on complementary Load Balancing and Scheduling Services to match patients and staff with the right scanner at the right time, driving more efficient workflows.
“Together with our clinical partners, we have identified those steps in the radiological process where we as Siemens Healthineers can effectively relieve some burden – by automating or outsourcing routine activities,” states Richard Jansen, Head of Enterprise Services at Siemens Healthineers Great Britain & Ireland. “We look forward to supporting radiology teams with this services suite so that they can focus on providing the best possible care for their patients.”
