Timely and accurate diagnosis increases patience chances for successful treatment. A combined mix of AI, medical imaging, and edge computing can deliver life-saving insights to the point of care. However, gaining access to the huge volumes of data required to train AI models while protecting patient privacy remains a key challenge.
Clara Federated Learning!
In an attempt to find a solution, GPU and system chips manufacturer NVIDIA has introduced ‘Clara Federated Learning,’ which takes advantage of a distributed, collaborative learning technique that keeps patient data inside the walls of a healthcare provider.
Notably, the Clara Federated Learning (Clara FL) runs on our recently announced NVIDIA EGX intelligent edge computing platform. Each client on the network can use the platform to perform deep learning training locally and collaborate to train a more accurate global model.
Used by radiologists in top healthcare providers
Clara FL is being used already by radiologists at top healthcare providers, including the American College of Radiology, King’s College London, and UCLA Health.
Participating hospitals label their patient data using the NVIDIA Clara AI-Assisted Annotation SDK integrated into medical viewers like 3D slicer, MITK, Fovia, and Philips Intellispace Discovery. Using pre-trained models and transfer learning techniques, NVIDIA AI assists radiologists in labeling, reducing the time for complex 3D studies from hours to minutes.
They aim to develop personalized AI for their doctors, patients, and facilities where medical data, applications, and devices are on the rise, and patient privacy must be preserved.
Nvidia Vice President of Healthcare, Kimberly Powell, said:
In the U.K., NVIDIA is partnering with King’s College London and Owkin to create a federated learning platform for the National Health Service. The Owkin Connect platform running on NVIDIA Clara enables algorithms to travel from one hospital to another, training on local datasets. It provides each hospital with a blockchain-distributed ledger that captures and traces all data used for model training.
As of now, the project is connecting four of London’s premier teaching hospitals, offering AI services to accelerate work in areas such as cancer, heart failure, and neurodegenerative disease, and will expand to at least 12 U.K. hospitals in 2020.
Clara AGX!
Alongside Clara FL, Nvidia announced a new embedded AI developer kit called Clara AGX that can handle image and video processing at high data rates, bringing AI inference and 3D visualization to the point of care.
Clara AGX is powered by NVIDIA Xavier SoCs, the same processors that control self-driving cars, and they consume as little as 10W. It’s worth mentioning that the software has already been embedded in portable “Hyperfine” the world’s first portable point-of-care MRI system. As per the company claims, it can also be used with various other medical instruments, surgical suites, smart medical cameras, and patient monitoring devices as well.
Main image credit: NVIDIA
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