Royal Philips Wins ITEA Awards for AI-Enabled Healthcare Innovations

Royal Philips has received two prestigious ITEA Awards of Excellence for its innovative healthcare projects, highlighting the company's commitment to advancing artificial intelligence (AI) in medical applications.

SYMPHONY, a Philips-led research collaboration, won the "Exceptional Excellence" award for its groundbreaking work in connecting healthcare data, clinical workflows, and AI-supported decision tools. The project developed a reusable, vendor-neutral reference architecture, demonstrating the integration of healthcare ecosystems across four clinical areas: prostate cancer, aortic aneurysm, atrial fibrillation, and multiple sclerosis. Philips partnered with leading medical centers such as Leiden University Medical Center, Amsterdam University Medical Center, and Karolinska University Hospital to implement SYMPHONY’s solutions.

One of the key achievements of SYMPHONY was the development of technology to automatically segment and measure vascular structures in medical images, supporting the assessment and follow-up of aortic aneurysms. This technology has received FDA clearance and CE marking and is now integrated into AV Vascular, a component of the Philips AV Cardiovascular Suite.

According to Sanjay Gandhi, Head of Medical Affairs & Clinical Partnerships at Philips, "Healthcare AI creates the greatest value when it can work with the information and clinical workflows that care teams already depend on. SYMPHONY shows what becomes possible when healthcare providers, researchers, and technology companies build around open standards and clinical pathways rather than isolated applications."

The SYMPHONY project also demonstrated the potential of standards-based integration in real-world settings. A collaboration with Leiden University Medical Center focused on vendor-neutral, standards-based integration of clinical data, imaging, and applications, including the AV Vascular Segmentation solution, to support clinical workflows.

In a separate project, AI FORSchung, Philips received the "Innovation" award for developing AI-driven methods to compress and analyze large volumes of fiber-optic sensing data. Fiber Optic RealShape (FORS) technology is used to support medical device navigation during image-guided procedures, generating substantial amounts of position data. AI FORSchung researchers developed new methods to compress these data volumes, demonstrating that FORS position data could be compressed more than 20 times while maintaining performance within evaluated datasets.

Ahmet Ekin, Senior Designer at Philips, noted, "The challenge extends well beyond healthcare. Fiber-optic sensing is also used to monitor critical infrastructure such as pipelines, bridges, and tunnels, where continuous monitoring generates substantial volumes of data. By developing approaches that can be applied across healthcare, utilities, and civil infrastructure, AI FORSchung demonstrated how advances in one field can help address shared data challenges in another."

Both SYMPHONY and AI FORSchung were conducted within the ITEA, the Eureka Research, Development and Innovation Cluster on software innovation, funded by multiple national authorities including the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO). The projects showcased Philips' dedication to leveraging AI to improve healthcare outcomes and streamline clinical workflows.