Nvidia announces deeper push into health care industry at GTC 2021
Nvidia (NVDA) is diving deeper into the health care industry. During its GTC 2021 conference, the company rolled out artificial intelligence and cloud capabilities that will improve the way drugs are made and give doctors new tools to treat patients.
The company also announced that a number of top-tier hospitals and research centers are using its technology to help understand and better treat certain types of cancer.
Nvidia says Entos, a San Diego-based startup that focuses on developing new medicines, is using the graphics and AI giant’s Nvidia Clara Discovery system to speed up the drug discovery process for drugs that can help fight types of cancer.
Clara Discovery is Nvidia’s own system that includes applications and AI models and frameworks that companies can use to help develop drugs. The idea is to dramatically cut down on the amount of experiments needed to find potential new compounds that can lead to the development of future medicines.
Beyond powering the tech needed to discover new medicines, Nvidia showed off how its AI and robotics are being used by companies to improve medical devices via the Nvidia Clara Holoscan platform. According to Nvidia, the platform can be used by device makers to create real-time medical imaging hardware, and will help with robotic surgery, mobile CT scans, and other advancements.
Johnson and Johnson’s Auris Monarch platform, for instance, uses robotics and small cameras with AI-assisted navigation and advanced visualization to let doctors access the inside of patients’ lungs to capture images and biopsies.
Then there’s the work hospitals are doing to help patients by using Nvidia’s technologies. MD Anderson in Texas is using Nvidia’s DGX Superpod, a cloud-based supercomputer, to develop new approaches to cancer care and help make treatment decisions.
The hospital is also using early-detection AI to diagnose pancreatic cancer patients, and another AI setup to cut down on the time needed to trace out the shape of tumors to provide radiation treatments.
St. Jude Children’s Hospital, meanwhile, is building AI to select patients for proton beam therapy, a less harmful cancer treatment for children. And Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is developing deep learning tools for digital pathology and machine learning for high risk breast cancer patients for more advanced breast MRI screening.
Nvidia’s technology has been used in medical fields in the past. Most recently, it’s been used to assist hospitals and doctors in detecting and determining treatments for COVID-19.
All of this from a company that used to be only known for making graphics cards.
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