NVIDIA Partners with NIH and The Ohio State University to Advance AI in Radiology

VCBeat (WeChat Official Account: vcbeat) learned from foreign media reports that on November 26, 2018, U.S. local time, NVIDIA aimed to promote the application of artificial intelligence in medical imaging through new software development kits and collaborations with The Ohio State University and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

NVIDIA is widely regarded as one of the key companies driving the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence through its GPU-based hardware and associated software portfolio, and it is vigorously promoting development in the field of AI-assisted radiology.

The company is refining its Clara platform, which enables users to leverage virtual supercomputing capabilities to advance medical imaging, and has entered into strategic collaboration agreements with The Ohio State University and the NIH to accelerate the application of AI in medical imaging.

NVIDIA stated that it collaborates with 75 partners in the healthcare sector, including medical centers, healthcare startups, research institutions, and medical imaging companies.

Image source: NVIDIA official website

To facilitate the development and deployment of these AI applications, NVIDIA also announced its Transfer Learning Toolkit, which enables physicians to incorporate a subset of private patient data into larger algorithms through an AI-assisted process, thereby customizing AI applications and models for their own use. This software capability is expected to be released in early 2019.

In addition to expanding its radiology software offerings, the company has signed two deals aimed at accelerating the adoption of AI technologies in medical imaging. One of these involves collaborating with The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center to establish what NVIDIA calls the first “in-house” marketplace for clinical medical imaging in the United States.

In essence, the company has helped Oregon State University establish a local app store to host various imaging algorithms that can be rapidly integrated across the hospital for diverse applications, including the detection of intracranial hemorrhage or coronary artery disease. NVIDIA’s vision is that this technology can be embedded into a wide range of clinical workflows, from early warning systems in emergency departments to computer-aided diagnostic tools in imaging reading rooms.

NVIDIA is also expanding the landscape of clinical trials through a collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the world’s leading biomedical research centers. The first phase of the partnership will involve NVIDIA researchers working alongside clinicians at the NIH Clinical Center to streamline oncology clinical trial programs using AI-powered imaging tools. The research will focus on accelerating the study of treatments for brain and liver cancers, while developing tools that integrate imaging, genomic, and clinical data to advance precision medicine.

A broader goal of this collaboration is to improve the largely manual cancer staging process by leveraging AI to more accurately characterize and measure tumors, integrated with individual biomarker data.