Mostly renowned for its powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) used in the video game industry, NVIDIA is no stranger to healthcare. In fact, it has a dedicated branch to offer solutions that its computing platform can deliver in medicine and was among the first players significantly investing in AI.
These initiatives might have been seen with some confusion five or seven years ago but certainly gave NVIDIA an edge in the past two years. For example when almost a year ago this study was published. The authors trained a large language model for medical language and fine-tuned it across a wide range of clinical and operational predictive tasks, including 30-day all-cause readmission prediction, in-hospital mortality prediction, comorbidity index prediction, length of stay prediction and insurance denial prediction.
In March 2024, the company announced the launch of two dozen new, AI-powered healthcare-focused tools. NVIDIA’s recent push into the healthcare sector extends to a collaboration with Hippocratic AI. Together, they’re developing generative AI “agents” designed to enhance tasks such as medication guidance, patient check-ins, and identifying health risks.
“For over a decade, we have partnered with the medical devices ecosystem to bring innovative diagnostic imaging, robotic surgery and patient monitoring devices to the market,” Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare of NVIDIA, told The Medical Futurist in an interview a while ago.
Prominently, the GPU manufacturer launched its AI platform, Clara in 2018 designed to augment medical imaging and genomics. It followed up a year later with a toolkit for radiologists, Clara AI, to help with the classification of images. In 2019, the tech giant also started to explore federated learning in healthcare, the privacy-focused AI training method.
While for many years this company was the silent member of the ‘tech giants in healthcare‘ club, in the past few months they seem to have switched gears and ramped up their healthcare projects.
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Building an NVIDIA-branded supercomputer
In 2020, NVIDIA announced its plans to build a computer; but rather than use it for gaming, they designed it to aid AI research in healthcare. Named Cambridge-1, it was no regular computer either: it was designed to be the UK’s most powerful supercomputer.
“The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will serve as a hub of innovation for the UK and further the groundbreaking work being done by the nation’s researchers in critical healthcare and drug discovery” – Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO, said during his 2020 GTC keynote.
Cambridge-1 was the first step taken by the tech giant to create an AI center of excellence in Cambridge. The long-term aim was to turn the area into a hub where researchers and startups can collaborate. The latest development in the supercomputer project was announced in November, when NVIDIA said to make it part of its DGX Cloud to broaden access to AI supercomputing for researchers.
Powering genomics, drug development and medical imaging with AI
“We have to make AI easier to use,” declared the NVIDIA CEO in his 2021 GTC keynote address. It seems like the company is steadily working towards that goal.
“NVIDIA invested $50 million in Recursion for its drug discovery projects. Recursion is inputting its biological and chemical data to train NVIDIA’s AI models on its cloud platform. The company has also worked with Roche’s Genentech to develop new medications and better treatment protocols. One of NVIDIA’s greatest health-care strengths to date is the BioNeMo platform, a generative AI cloud service specifically made for drug development.” – came the news report in March 2024.
NVIDIA had an eye on applying AI in genomics ever since it launched Clara and it hasn’t lost track of this target. In March 2021, the tech giant announced a partnership with Harvard University to develop an AI-based genome research toolkit. Named AtacWorks, it could sequence a whole genome in 30 minutes.
“Models trained by AtacWorks can detect peaks from cell types not seen in the training data, and are generalizable across diverse sample preparations and experimental platforms,” explained researchers working with the software.
The tech company was also one of the early players to assist drug discovery with AI. NVIDIA announced an AI project with AstraZeneca and the University of Florida to boost drug discovery. The drug-discovery model, named MegaMoIBART, was aimed at “reaction prediction, molecular optimization and de novo molecular generation”.
NVIDIA also announced during its 2021 GTC event its collaboration with Carestream Health, a medical imaging specialist. The latter will incorporate NVIDIA’s Clara AI platform into imaging devices used for X-ray screening.
Surgical robots and biotech
In the spring of 2024 Nvidia reported deals with Johnson & Johnson for use of generative AI in surgery, and with GE Healthcare to improve medical imaging. These are just a few of the healthcare, biotech or pharma companies that turn to NVIDIA, as their graphic processing units (GPUs) are ideal for a broad range of computational tasks, such as simulations, deep learning, and data analysis.
As the analysis from The Robot Report pointed out, this is not all, as NVIDIA already had been working with Asensus Surgical and Medtronic.
NVIDIA in healthcare: a focused path
These recent developments indicate a rather focused path for NVIDIA in healthcare. While its plans aren’t as diverse as that of Amazon or Google, the company hasn’t faced significant hurdles recently as it is focusing on its computing strengths. For NVIDIA, that strength has mostly revolved around AI frameworks and to aid basic research with the help of AI.
NVIDIA envisions a major role for AI in the future of healthcare. Kimberly Powell, VP of NVIDIA, shared the company’s vision for that future with The Medical Futurist in a Patreon interview. “Hospitals will use AI cameras to automatically screen for elevated body temperature, use genomics sequencing to predict how lethal a virus or suspected condition could be for each patient, use AI in medical imaging for detection and predicting clinical outcomes, incorporate AI into everyday cameras and microphones to monitor and interact with patients,” Powell said two years ago and her vision seems more accurate than ever.
But NVIDIA isn’t the only tech giant with a vision for healthcare. For a deeper dive into their long-term plans, we recommend our e-book, Tech Giants In Healthcare, dedicated to the topic. We hope you will find these helpful!
Written by Dr. Bertalan Meskó & Dr. Pranavsingh Dhunnoo
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