By GE Healthcare | Nov 26, 2017
The company that made its name in gaming and driverless cars is expanding its footprint in healthcare, with a partnership announced today
The average hospital creates 50 petabytes of data per year. For context, that’s equivalent to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text or 13.3 years of HD-TV video.[1] It’s a lot of information, and more than 97 percent of it goes unanalyzed or unused.
But healthcare’s big data challenge may soon meet its match. Artificial Intelligence – the technology that mimics the human brain – has proven that it has the potential to see the unseen, answer questions that had never even been asked, and consume information previously impossible for clinicians to digest.
That’s why GE Healthcare and NVIDIA say they are deepening their 10-year partnership to bring the most sophisticated AI to GE Healthcare’s 500,000 imaging devices globally and accelerate the speed at which healthcare data can be processed.
NVIDIA, which has helped pioneer the spread of AI across a growing range of fields, including self-driving cars, robotics and video analytics, is working with GE Healthcare to spread its application in healthcare. GPU-accelerated deep learning solutions can be used to design more sophisticated neural networks for healthcare and medical applications—from real-time medical condition assessment to point-of-care interventions to predictive analytics for clinical decision-making. For patients, the partnership aims to drive lower radiation doses, faster exam times and higher quality medical imaging.
“Our partnership with GE Healthcare brings together great expertise in medical instruments and AI to create a new generation of intelligent instruments that can dramatically improve patient care,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
Among the devices to first be embedded with the latest AI technology is GE Healthcare’s new CT system in the Revolution Family. The Revolution Frontier CT is two times faster in imaging processing than its predecessor, due to its use of NVIDIA’s AI computing platform. It also is expected to deliver better clinical outcomes in liver lesion detection and kidney lesion characterization because of its speed – potentially reducing the need for unnecessary follow-ups, benefitting patients with compromised renal function, and reducing non-interpretable scans with Gemstone Spectral Imaging Metal Artefact Reduction (GSI MAR).
An image from a Revolution CT
GE Healthcare’s Vivid E95 4D Ultrasound System also uses NVIDIA GPUs to provide fast, accurate visualization and quantification while streamlining workflows across the cSound™ imaging platform. NVIDIA GPUs accelerate reconstruction and visualization of blood flow and improve 2D and 4D imaging for Echo Lab and Interventional deployments.
Finally, modules of GE Healthcare’s new analytics platform will use NVIDIA GPUs, the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing platform and the NVIDIA GPU Cloud container registry to accelerate the creation, deployment and consumption of deep learning algorithms in new healthcare analytic applications that will be seamlessly integrated into clinical and operational workflows and equipment.
“Healthcare is changing at remarkable speed, and the technologies that will transform the industry should reflect that pace,” said Kieran Murphy, President and CEO of GE Healthcare. “By partnering with NVIDIA, GE Healthcare will be able to deliver devices of the future – intelligent machines capable of empowering providers to improve the speed and accuracy of diagnoses for patients around the world.”