Samsung Medical Center (SMC) in South Korea is building a medical research platform on Amazon Web Services to accelerate research at healthcare institutions worldwide and help hospitals better cope with new infectious diseases like COVID-19.
The SMC system comprises the Samsung Seoul Hospital, Kangbook Samsung Hospital, Samsung Changwon Hospital, and the Samsung Life Sciences Research Center.
Using AWS’s portfolio of cloud services — including machine learning (ML), compute, networking and content delivery, security, identity, and compliance services — SMC is enabling pharmaceutical companies and hospitals to collaboratively share and analyse medical data, optimise clinical decision-making by ensuring healthcare providers have the right information at the right time, and predict disease outcomes to improve the health of patients worldwide while providing personalised care.
Using Amazon SageMaker to build, train and deploy machine learning models quickly, SMC will train machine learning models to help researchers better understand vast quantities of medical disease research data from various research projects and identify new treatment options.
For example, SMC is developing an AI-powered solution that detects pressure ulcers in bedridden patients through scanned images, allowing clinicians to scan areas where pressure ulcers are likely to form on patients who are unable to reposition themselves, classify risk levels of pressure ulcers through ML technology, and take preventive measures.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) helps SMC assure complete data protection and network security when researchers work with confidential patient data, enabling the institution to completely protect research data.
Using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), SMC simplifies complex processes, including user identification, authentication, and behavior analysis, and maintains consistent security practices with identity management and authentication tools like multi-factor authentication to provide highly privileged users the right level of access to tools and information in the research environment.
Pung-Ryeol Lee, head of SMC’s Office of Data Innovation, said AWS’s suite of cloud services enables their teams to seamlessly and securely work with other domestic and overseas healthcare institutions on SMC’s platform to fuel the global understanding of diseases and improve patient outcomes worldwide.
