King’s College London, a leader in medical research, is Europe’s first clinical partner to adopt NVIDIA DGX-2 and the NVIDIA Clara platform. KCL is deploying NVIDIA AI solutions to rethink the practice of radiology and pathology in a quest to better serve 8 million patients in the U.K.’s National Health Service.
NVIDIA and KCL will co-locate researchers and engineers with clinicians from major London hospitals that are part of the NHS Trust citywide network, including King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’, and South London and Maudsley. The trio of research, technology and clinicians will accelerate discovery of critical data strategies, targeted AI problems and speed deployment in the clinic.
“This is a huge opportunity to transform patient outcomes by applying the extraordinary capabilities of AI to ultimately make diagnoses earlier and more accurately than in the past,” said Professor Sebastien Ourselin, head of the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences at KCL. “This partnership will combine our expertise in medical imaging and health records with NVIDIA’s technology to improve patient care across the U.K.”
First up is unleashing the power of DGX-2 on the advanced imaging and analytics challenges at KCL. The DGX-2 system’s large memory and 2 petaflops of computing prowess make it perfect to tackle the training of large, 3D datasets in minutes instead of days.
Training at scale is tricky, but the DGX-2 can enhance medical imaging AI tools like Niftynet, a TensorFlow-based open-source convolutional neural network platform for research in medical image analysis and image-guided therapy developed at KCL.
If infrastructure and tools are at the heart of developing AI applications, data is the blood that makes the heart do something magical. Federated learning, the ability to learn from data that is not centralized, is one example.
Working with KCL’s clinical network to crack the technical and data governance issues of federated learning could lead to breakthroughs such as more precisely classifying stroke and neurological impairments to recommend the best treatment or automatic biomarker determination.
NVIDIA Clara is the computing platform for deploying breakthrough applications like these. Like its namesake, Clara Barton, the platform is meant to help people. It’s universal, scalable and accessible to the applications that need to run in clinical workflows.
From development to deployment, NVIDIA and KCL plan to streamline AI while building the necessary tools, infrastructure and best practices to empower the entire clinical ecosystem.