NVIDIA launches platform to make all medical devices smart
Nvidia goes MedTech
Most people know NVIDIA primarily as a manufacturer of graphics cards. But the company is also a major player when it comes to heavy number-crunching hardware. From crypto mining to industrial big data applications, NVIDIA has the hardware for it. But that’s not all: Increasingly, NVIDIA is also developing its own software frameworks tailored to its hardware.
At the recent GTC conference—NVIDIA's conference for AI developers—the company unveiled a software/hardware package for the medical market. The offering adds appropriately-tailored hardware to NVIDIA's Clara software framework, which is used for AI-assisted imaging in diagnostics, genomics, drug development, and intelligent hospital monitoring, among other applications.
Clara Holoscan is an integrated hardware/software platform designed specifically for Clara. Medical device manufacturers can connect their sensor data with NVIDIA's AI and processing capabilities to achieve better outcomes.
The bigger picture
The topic may seem a bit boring, but we think NVIDIA’s push is a big step toward a future where virtually all medical devices with sensors use artificial intelligence to analyze the data they collect. And this will be done in real time, retrieved via the cloud. The big question is: Who will dominate the market?
Today, much of the internet already relies on commoditized hardware/software AI infrastructure services from Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. They are cheap, reliable, and secure. A similar dynamic seems likely in industrial internet sectors. Medical device manufacturers will have to work hard to compete with specialized infrastructure suppliers who rely on economies of scale and combine talent, capital, and intellectual property.
Why it matters for MedTech companies
This is why we think medical device manufacturers should only develop special algorithms in niches to save themselves costs and effort. Given the software weaknesses of many manufacturers, an acquisition strategy is the only way to go. So it's fitting that Philips has just bought Cardiologs, an AI startup for cardiology.