NVIDIA, radiology organization team to extend use of AI

NVIDIA is expanding its working relationship with the American College of Radiology in a collaboration intended to extend the use of artificial intelligence for diagnostic radiology.

The agreement will expand the number of radiologists that can use an NVIDIA application and data sharing toolkit for use in their own facilities with their own data to meet their specific clinical needs.

For its part, ACR is offering AI-LAB, a free software platform that will be made available to its more than 38,0000 members and other radiology professionals. The combined capabilities will enable radiologists to build, share, locally adapt and validate AI algorithms.

At the same time, the arrangement also will ensure that patient data will stay, protected, at participating healthcare organizations.

The ability to share data and AI algorithms is enabled by the NVIDIA Clara AI toolkit, which is a key part of the NVIDIA Clara developer platform that is designed to enable software-defined medical instruments and intelligent workflows. The platform is designed to create data and algorithm pipelines—it consists of libraries for data and image processing, AI model processing, and visualization.

For AI, the Clara AI toolkit includes libraries for data annotation, model training, model adaptation, model federation and large-scale deployment.

NVIDIA, growing from its base of developing graphic processing units that display radiological images, has been expanding its footprint in radiology by establishing more partnerships and developing tools to assist radiologists.

Company executives say it’s working with 75 partners, including several academic medical centers and the National Institutes of Health, to advance the use of artificial intelligence in radiology practice.

In making this announcement with the ACR, the association says that achieving the vision of the ACR AI-LAB a reality requires the collaboration of the entire ecosystem, including industry leaders GE Healthcare, Nuance and NVIDIA, along with a vast network of healthcare startups and leading research institutes. NVIDIA Clara powers GE Healthcare’s Edison AI platform and the Nuance AI Marketplace, both of which are supporting the AI-LAB and are solutions for the deployment of AI within the radiology workflow.

“This collaboration marks a significant milestone in an extraordinary ACR Data Science Institute project, helping enable the launch of the ACR AI-LAB, giving radiologists in any practice environment an opportunity to become involved in AI development at their own institutions, using their own patient data to meet their own clinical needs,” said Bibb Allen Jr., MD, chief medical officer of the Data Science Institute at the American College of Radiology.