NVIDIA Clara platform brings AI-backed capabilities for healthcare

Source: NVIDIA. The Clara platform.

NVIDIA has unveiled the NVIDIA Clara platform, a combination of hardware and software that brings artificial intelligence (AI) to the next generation of medical instruments for the early detection, diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

The Clara platform addresses the great challenge of medical instruments: processing the massive sea of data — tens to thousands of gigabytes worth — generated each second so it can be interpreted by doctors and scientists. Achieving this level of supercomputing has traditionally required three computing architectures: field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs).

At the heart of the platform are NVIDIA Clara AGX — a new computing architecture based on the NVIDIA Xavier AI computing module and NVIDIA Turing GPUs — and the Clara software development kit (SDK) which allows developers to create AI-powered applications for processing data from existing systems.

Clara AGX simplifies hardware requirements by enabling a single, GPU-based architecture to deliver fast AI inferencing on NVIDIA Tensor Cores; acceleration through CUDA, the world’s most widely adopted accelerated computing platform; and NVIDIA RTX graphics.

Clara also addresses a fundamental disconnect between legacy medical instruments — which typically have a lifespan of over 10 years — and their ability to run modern applications, which benefit from the 1,000x acceleration of GPU computing over the past decade.

It achieves this by enabling the installed base of instruments to connect to the latest NVIDIA GPU servers through its ability to process raw instrument data. With Clara, the most advanced imaging applications — like iterative reconstruction for computer tomography (CT) and X-rays, beamforming for ultrasound and compressed sensing for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) — will be able to run on 10-year-old instruments.

The Clara SDK provides medical-application developers with a set of GPU-accelerated libraries for computing, graphics and AI; example applications for reconstruction, image processing and rendering; and computational workflows for CT, MRI and ultrasound usage. These all leverage containers and Kubernetes to virtualise and scale medical instrument applications for any instrument.

NVIDIA notes that Clara is ideal for the over 400 AI healthcare startups which have launched in the past five years. For instance, Subtle Medical, a member of the NVIDIA Inception virtual accelerator programme, is working on MRI applications that acquire images in one-quarter the time while requiring just one-tenth the contrast dosage to be given to patients. Subtle Medical developers got their application running in a few hours, with an immediate speedup of 10x for AI inferencing.

“We are using AI to improve workflow for MRI and positron-emission tomography (PET) exams,” said Enhao Gong, founder of Subtle Medical. “NVIDIA’s Clara platform will enable us to seamlessly scale our technology to reduce risks from contrast and radiation, taking imaging efficiency and safety to the next level.”

ImFusion, also an Inception member, can create 3D ultrasound from a traditional 2D acquisition, and then visualise an image based on ultrasound data fused with CT. ImFusion developers ported their application to Clara in less than two days and take advantage of Clara’s inferencing, cinematic rendering engine and virtualisation capability.

“We specialise in accelerated medical image computing and guided surgery,” said Wolfgang Wein, founder and CEO of ImFusion. “NVIDIA’s Clara platform gives us the ability to turn 2D medical images into 3D and deploy our technology virtually.”

Explore:

The NVIDIA Clara platform is available now to early access partners, with a targeted beta planned for the second quarter of 2019. Get started on Clara AGX development with the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit.