Mike Daniels VP Public Sector Google Cloud

Google Cloud has been selected by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to prototype an AI-enabled digital pathology solution at Department of Defense (DoD) facilities, including the delivery of augmented reality microscopes to DoD’s medical facilities and access to artificial intelligence (AI) models, the company reported on Monday. 

“To effectively treat cancer, speed and accuracy are critical,” said Mike Daniels, vice president of Global Public Sector for Google Cloud. “We are partnering with DIU to provide our machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to help frontline healthcare practitioners learn about capabilities that can improve the lives of our military men and women and their families.”

Google Cloud’s technology will enable doctors to more effectively treat and diagnose cancer. The early access to the digital pathology platform is for research use only. DIU is the organization exclusively focused within the DoD on scaling commercial technology across the department.

The DIU-Google Cloud partnership will improve the accuracy of diagnoses, assist physicians make diagnostic and treatment decisions and to help lower overall healthcare costs. Google Cloud will prototype the delivery of an augmented reality microscope that overlays AI-based information for doctors, providing pathology-based cancer detection tools at the point-of-care. 

Google will leverage TensorFlow, an open-source framework to help deliver machine-learning models as well as the Google Cloud Healthcare API for data ingestion and de-identification to maximize patient privacy. The AI-based models used to assist doctors as part of the prototype were developed from public and private datasets. 

The partnership will be the second contract that Google has been awarded by DIU in the past three months. In May, Google and DIU collaborated to detect, protect against, and respond to cyberthreats globally. Carahsoft serves as Google Cloud’s government distributor and facilitated the contract. The Joint AI Center (JAIC) will fund the project and technical expertise. 

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