Original reporting sourced from aithority.com. Article covers Google Cloud’s presence at RSNA 2019, held December 1–7, 2019, at McCormick Place, Chicago, IL.
Google Cloud Takes Center Stage at RSNA 2019
The 105th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) opened on December 1, 2019, at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. The week-long event brought together leading players in AI, machine learning, cloud computing, and automation serving the healthcare and life sciences sectors. Among the major exhibitors, Google Cloud stood out as a prominent presence, using the conference to demonstrate its expanding portfolio of cloud solutions tailored specifically for radiology and broader healthcare use cases.
What Google Cloud Was Showcasing
Google Cloud’s exhibition at RSNA 2019 centered on recent advances in cloud-native services designed for healthcare and life sciences organizations. Key areas of focus included:
- Managed DICOM Services: Tools enabling healthcare organizations to store, manage, and retrieve medical imaging data using the DICOM standard in a fully managed cloud environment.
- HIPAA-Supported Deployments: Cloud infrastructure and configurations aligned with HIPAA compliance requirements, aimed at reducing the compliance burden for healthcare IT teams.
- Data De-identification: Solutions designed to strip personally identifiable information from DICOM images, supporting privacy-safe data sharing and research workflows.
- Analytics and AI Integration: Emerging capabilities applying machine learning to radiology workflows, including image recognition and big data analytics.
Google also highlighted developer tooling relevant to healthcare cloud deployments. Cloud Code for popular IDEs was presented as a way to help development teams write, deploy, and debug cloud-native applications more efficiently. Stackdriver Logging (now part of Google Cloud’s operations suite) was highlighted for its advanced log searching and filtering capabilities within cloud-native environments.
Corporate Symposium: “Journey to the Cloud”
On December 3, Google Cloud hosted a corporate symposium titled Journey to the Cloud. The session featured insights and testimonials from Google Cloud customers and partners operating in the radiology and imaging space. The stated goals of the symposium were to drive innovation in the PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) industry, support real-world evidence generation, and accelerate the development of next-generation imaging solutions.
Cloud Services and Specializations on Display
Attendees could engage with Google Cloud representatives across several specialized solution areas relevant to radiology departments and healthcare IT teams:
- Disaster recovery planning and implementation in the cloud
- Vendor-neutral archiving (VNA) solutions
- Next-generation PACS solutions
- Teleradiology infrastructure and workflows
- Machine learning-based workflow optimization
- Cost-reduction strategies for Google Cloud deployments in healthcare settings
AI in Healthcare: Google and Kaggle’s Medical Imaging Competitions
One of the more notable initiatives at RSNA 2019 was Google’s collaboration with Kaggle, the data science and machine learning competition platform. Together, the two organizations hosted AI-based medical imaging competitions designed to spur innovation in clinical diagnostics.
A prominent competition focused on detecting intracranial hemorrhage — bleeding that occurs inside the cranium — from medical images. This is a clinically urgent problem: rapid, accurate detection of intracranial hemorrhage is critical for patient outcomes in emergency settings. Winning competitors worked with an enriched imaging dataset assembled by RSNA in collaboration with the American Society of Neuroradiology and MD.ai. The prize for the winning team was $25,000.
These competitions serve a dual purpose: they generate novel AI models that may have real clinical value, and they expand the community of machine learning practitioners working on healthcare problems.
About RSNA
The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) is an international professional society representing radiologists, medical physicists, and other medical professionals. With more than 54,000 members across 146 countries, RSNA is one of the largest radiology organizations in the world. The society has been an active proponent of AI research in radiology, particularly in applying machine learning to the detection and classification of conditions such as intracranial hemorrhage — work that has the potential to prioritize urgent cases and accelerate clinical decision-making.
Why This Matters for DevOps and Cloud Engineering Teams in Healthcare
Google Cloud’s presence at RSNA 2019 reflects a broader trend: major cloud providers are investing heavily in healthcare-specific managed services, compliance tooling, and AI capabilities. For DevOps engineers working in regulated healthcare environments, the practical takeaways from RSNA 2019 include the maturation of managed DICOM APIs, tighter integration between cloud storage and ML pipelines for imaging data, and improved support for HIPAA-compliant infrastructure-as-code patterns. As these services stabilize, the operational complexity of building and maintaining radiology IT infrastructure in the cloud continues to decrease.