American Heart Association’s Precision Medicine Platform and Hitachi Vantara Announce New Alliance

The alliance will make the platform even more accessible for fast, efficient supercomputing data analysis research.

The Dallas-headquartered American Heart Association announced a new alliance today between its Precision Medicine Platform and Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure, data management, and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. 

The alliance will make the platform “even more accessible to healthcare organizations for fast, efficient supercomputing data analysis research, even from a laptop computer,” the association said in a statement.

“Moving data science and healthcare forward is at the heart of everything we do at the American Heart Association,” said Jennifer Hall, Ph.D., chief of data science and director of the Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine for the American Heart Association. “The Precision Medicine Platform provides cutting-edge solutions for data management and opens data access and analysis to all researchers, everywhere, which can help bring healthcare solutions to the general public.”

The institute has funded more than 90 data scientists, engineers, and usability experts whose work was instrumental in advancing the Precision Medicine Platform. 

The platform is a cloud-based digital solution “with secure, private workspaces equipped for data management and analysis, including tools for machine learning and artificial intelligence,” the association says. Flexible software choices and data analysis tools allow the platform to run at a fraction of the cost of traditional data analysis platforms.

The platform has enabled users to apply artificial intelligence to angiograms to identify patients in greatest need of a coronary stent.

It’s also enabled the repurposing of 3 million knee MRI images to better predict artery blockage and cardiovascular risk. The platform’s algorithm reduced image processing time from four hours to just two minutes, by localizing arteries within the MRI slices. The same algorithm is used to detect objects like cars on a highway.

“The American Heart Association and Hitachi Vantara bring together the best of medicine, science and technology to enable data-driven outcomes towards society’s most difficult medical challenges,” said Paul Watson, vice president, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Hitachi Vantara, in the statement. “Together, we’ll dramatically shift the industry standard for data sharing and research collaboration.” 

The alliance allows Hitachi Vantara to sell licenses of the platform.

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