That’s the goal of a new partnership between Partners HealthCare, the hospital's parent organization, and GE Healthcare. The two Boston-based institutions in May announced a 10-year collaboration to develop and integrate artificial intelligence throughout Partners’ clinical operations.

Partners hopes A.I. can improve patient outcomes and increase clinician productivity. The nonprofit healthcare system plans to first use A.I. to enhance diagnostic imaging, with intelligent systems being developed to detect, for example, even minute changes in tumors and then use data analysis to determine optimal treatments tailored to each case.

This is the future of medicine, but it’s been a long time in the making. The medical community has been laying the groundwork for such advances for years, says Mark Michalski, executive director of the Center for Clinical Data Science, a collaboration of MGH and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“We’ve been collecting and annotating data for decades without knowing that this was when artificial intelligence was going to take,” Michalski says. “The tools are now quite good, and the potential is astounding.”

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