Apr 11
2019
NVIDIA and American College of Radiology AI-LAB Team Accelerates Adoption of AI In Diagnostic Radiology Across Thousands of Hospitals
NVIDIA and the American College of Radiology announced a collaboration to enable thousands of radiologists nationwide to create and use AI for diagnostic radiology in their own facilities, using their own data, to meet their own clinical needs.
Following a successful three-month pilot program by both parties, ACR is integrating the NVIDIA Clara AI toolkit into the newly announced ACR Data Science Institute ACR AI-LAB, a free software platform that will be made available to more than 38,000 ACR members and other radiology professionals to build, share, locally adapt and validate AI algorithms, while also ensuring patient data stays protected at the local institution.
The NVIDIA Clara AI toolkit is a key part of the NVIDIA Clara developer platform, which is designed to enable software-defined medical instruments and intelligent workflows. A platform to create data and algorithm pipelines, NVIDIA Clara consists of libraries for data and image processing, AI model processing, and visualization. For AI, the toolkit includes libraries for data annotation, model training, model adaptation, model federation and large-scale deployment.
Making 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 key 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., M.D., FACR and chief medical officer of the Data Science Institute at the American College of Radiology.
“NVIDIA builds platforms that democratize the use of AI and we purpose-built the Clara AI toolkit to give every radiologist the opportunity to develop AI tools that are customized to their patients and their clinical practice,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Healthcare at NVIDIA. “Our successful pilot with the ACR is the first of many that will make AI more accessible to the entire field of radiology.”
Successful pilot paves way to democratized AI for healthcare
An initial pilot with the Ohio State University (OSU) and the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Center for Clinical Data Science (CCDS) helped NVIDIA and ACR define the assets and pathways necessary to enable facilities to work together and with industry to refine AI algorithms without sharing potentially sensitive patient data. Bringing an AI model to the patient data, instead of patient data to the model, can help increase diversity in algorithm training, facilitate validation of the algorithms and enable radiologists to learn the steps needed to adapt algorithms to their institutions’ clinical needs.