ICAD and Google Health Ink Strategic Development and Commercialization Agreement

Google Health AI and Cloud technology to be integrated into iCAD’s portfolio with potential to elevate performance and expand access to millions of women worldwide

Agreement marks Google Health’s first partnership with a mammography AI vendor

NASHUA, N.H., Nov. 28, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- iCAD, Inc. (NASDAQ: ICAD), a global medical technology leader providing innovative cancer detection and therapy solutions, today announced a strategic development and commercialization agreement with Google Health to integrate its artificial intelligence (AI) technology into iCAD’s portfolio of breast imaging AI solutions. Marking the first commercial partnership Google Health has entered into to introduce its breast imaging AI into clinical practice, the companies will work together to enhance iCAD’s market-leading breast cancer AI solutions for mammography and expand access to the technology to millions of women and providers worldwide. iCAD will also leverage Google Cloud’s secure, scalable infrastructure, accelerating the time to market for iCAD’s cloud-hosted offerings.

Under the definitive agreement, Google has licensed its AI technology for breast cancer and personalized risk assessment to iCAD. iCAD will apply the licensed technology to further improve its 3D and 2D AI algorithms and will commercialize developed products. 

“Joining forces with Google marks a historic milestone for our Company, as leveraging Google’s world-class AI and Cloud technology elevates the caliber of our market-leading breast AI technologies and may also accelerate adoption and expand access on a global scale,” said Stacey Stevens, President and CEO of iCAD, Inc. “iCAD and Google Health are united in our purpose-driven missions to elevate innovation, improve patient care and optimize outcomes for all. By combining the power of our technologies and teams, we strengthen our fight against breast cancer and positively impact the lives of women and their loved ones across the globe.”

“Google Health is our cross-company initiative to use technology to help everyone, everywhere be healthier – and collaborating with leading-edge companies like iCAD is a key part of this strategy,” said Greg Corrado, Ph.D., Head of Health AI, Google. “Google Health’s AI tech could be used to make healthcare more available, more accessible, more accurate. But effecting change like this will only be possible if we work closely with forward-looking partners, those with a deep tradition of pioneering innovation and the market experience and wherewithal to put innovations into real workflows. The entire ecosystem needs to work together to advance healthcare solutions that truly better serve patients, doctors, and health systems. Google Health working with iCAD is a great example of two organizations coming together to leverage our mutual strengths, technological capabilities, and resources to improve breast cancer screening worldwide, with the ultimate goal of improving health outcomes of individuals and communities.”

Advancing innovation through collaboration
iCAD’s Breast AI Suite is a comprehensive portfolio of clinically proven technologies for breast cancer detection, density assessment and personalized short-term risk evaluation. Under the agreement, iCAD will validate and integrate Google Health’s mammography AI technology into its Breast AI Suite, with the goal of supporting patients’ cancer journeys.

“Although 3D mammography is growing in adoption around the world, in many countries 2D mammography remains widely prevalent for breast cancer screening. Many European countries require double-reading for mammography, yet the global shortage of mammography professionals makes this particularly challenging in many cases,” said Axel Gräwingholt, MD, a radiologist at the Radiologie Am Theater in Paderborn, Germany. “A growing body of research shows ProFound AI^® could play a significant role in empowering clinicians to overcome these challenges, and iCAD’s commitment to the continual advancement of this technology provides clinicians critical tools that can lead to improved outcomes for all.”

iCAD also plans to incorporate Google Health’s mammography AI technology into ProFound AI Risk, the world’s first clinical decision support tool that provides an accurate short-term breast cancer risk estimation that is truly personalized for each person. This is the only commercially available technology that can prospectively identify people who are at a high risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer before or at their next screening, using information readily available in a screening mammogram. It offers clinicians critical information that can help them tailor screening regimens for patients, based on their personal risk, rather than a one-size-fits-all age-based screening program that is the case in many countries.

“iCAD’s Breast AI technologies are revolutionizing breast cancer screening by making it more accurate, efficient and personalized. With the addition of Google Health’s technology, we are positioned to improve the performance of our algorithms for both 2D and 3D mammography, which will further strengthen our market leadership position and drive worldwide adoption,” added Ms. Stevens. “This partnership will enable us to take advantage of Google Health’s strengths, technological capabilities and resources as a global leader in AI. By joining forces with Google Health, we are providing a pathway to further elevate our portfolio and deliver it on a global scale.”

Expanding access via cloud-based offerings
In addition to licensing Google Health’s mammography AI technology, iCAD will also leverage Google Cloud’s secure, scalable infrastructure to begin transforming its delivery model from an on-premise suite of solutions to cloud-hosted solutions. The ability to expand cloud-hosted solutions into new regions can help the company scale access to AI-based tools in underserved regions that are constrained by infrastructure challenges.

Google Cloud currently supports a wide variety of healthcare systems and workflows, with the goal of facilitating secure, continuous patient care, empowering healthcare professionals with collaboration and productivity tools, and making better clinical and operational decisions based on data analytics and insights. By integrating with Google Cloud, iCAD customers will be able to deploy and scale iCAD’s solutions more seamlessly, offering unparalleled interoperability and the potential to expand access on a global scale.

“With customers in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, Google Cloud is used pervasively across a range of industries, and it is particularly well optimized for healthcare imaging AI delivery. This partnership will improve our ability to expand our addressable market and accelerate the commercialization of our own cloud offering," said Ms. Stevens. “Healthcare providers are increasingly moving away from locally deployed systems in favor of virtual or remote settings. Additionally, hospitals are under increasing pressure to reduce costs, while providing higher quality care, underscoring the need to streamline operations and increase clinician productivity. Integrating Google’s Cloud technology into this more flexible delivery model offers facilities the solution they need, and the technology patients deserve.”

About iCAD, Inc.
Headquartered in Nashua, NH, iCAD^® is a global medical technology leader providing innovative cancer detection and therapy solutions. For more information, visit www.icadmed.com.

About Google Health
Google Health is our company-wide effort to help billions of people be healthier. We work toward this vision by meeting people in their everyday moments and empowering them to stay healthy and partnering with care teams and the public health community to provide more accurate, accessible, and equitable care. Our teams are applying our expertise and technology to improve health outcomes globally – with high-quality information and tools to help people manage their health and wellbeing, solutions to transform care delivery, research to catalyze the use of artificial intelligence for the screening and diagnosis of disease, and data and insights to the public health community. https://health.google/

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this News Release constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements about the expansion of access to the Company’s products, improvement of performance, acceleration of adoption, expected benefits of ProFound AI^®, the benefits of the Company’s products, and future prospects for the Company’s technology platforms and products. Such forward-looking statements involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited, to the Company’s ability to achieve business and strategic objectives, the willingness of patients to undergo mammography screening in light of risks of potential exposure to Covid-19, whether mammography screening will be treated as an essential procedure, whether ProFound AI will improve reading efficiency, improve specificity and sensitivity, reduce false positives and otherwise prove to be more beneficial for patients and clinicians, the impact of supply and manufacturing constraints or difficulties on our ability to fulfill our orders, uncertainty of future sales levels, to defend itself in litigation matters, protection of patents and other proprietary rights, product market acceptance, possible technological obsolescence of products, increased competition, government regulation, changes in Medicare or other reimbursement policies, risks relating to our existing and future debt obligations, competitive factors, the effects of a decline in the economy or markets served by the Company; and other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The words “believe,” “demonstrate,” “intend,” “expect,” “estimate,” “will,” “continue,” “anticipate,” “likely,” “seek,” and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on those forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date the statement was made. The Company is under no obligation to provide any updates to any information contained in this release. For additional disclosure regarding these and other risks faced by iCAD, please see the disclosure contained in our public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, available on the Investors section of our website at http://www.icadmed.com and on the SEC’s website at http://www.sec.gov.

Contact:
Media Inquiries:
Jessica Burns, iCAD
[phone]
[e-mail]

Investor Inquiries:
iCAD Investor Relations
[e-mail] 

Source: iCAD, Inc.

2022 GlobeNewswire, Inc., source Press Releases