NVIDIA Collaborates With Medtronic To Build AI Platform For Endoscopy Devices

In a press release, NVIDIA announced a collaboration with Medtronic to integrate NVIDIA’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology into certain of Medtronic’s products. NVIDIA is a graphics processing unit (GPU) company, and Medtronic is a medical device company.

In particular, the press release states that Medtronic will integrate both NVIDIA’s Holoscan AI computing software platform for building medical devices and NVIDIA IGX, an edge AI hardware platform, into Medtronic’s GI GeniusTM Endoscopy module. Holoscan is described in the press release as providing an infrastructure for scalable, software-defined, real-time processing of data at the edge.

“Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can increase the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of global health systems,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. “We are partnering with Medtronic to accelerate AI innovation by enabling a software-defined business model, with the goal of improving clinical decision-making, reducing medical variability and achieving better patient outcomes.”

In NVIDIA’s technical blog titled “How Edge Computing is Transforming Healthcare, edge computing is described as intended to overcome issues and drawbacks related to bandwidth congestion, network reliability, latency and other issues related to remote data analytics by providing treatment solutions analyze and develop on the data at the point of collection. As NVIDIA describes it, edge computing refers to computing that takes place at the point of collection—in this case, at the device, and is intended to provide faster, more reliable computing. NVIDIA also indicates that improvements with edge devices could lead to significant benefits in the healthcare industry, where it is estimated that there are 10-15 edge devices connected to each hospital bed. NVIDIA says in this blog that it expects the global market for connected medical devices to grow to $158 billion in 2022, up from $41 billion in 2017.

The reported developer and manufacturer of the GI GeniusTM Intelligent Endoscopy Module – Cosmo Pharmaceuticals NV – says in a press release that the GI GeniusTM Intelligent Endoscopy Module is an FDA-approved AI-assisted colonoscopy tool designed to assist physicians to detect lesions that may lead to colorectal cancer by improving diagnostic imaging used during colonoscopy procedures. Cosmo states that the GI GeniusTM Intelligent Endoscopy module can help reduce the number of undetected precancerous lesions. According to this press release, Medtronic is the exclusive worldwide distributor of the GI GeniusTM Intelligent Endoscopy Module.

Medtronic states in its education and training materials that the GI GeniusTM Intelligent Endoscopy module is designed to assist colonoscopy procedures in real time by using visual markers to alert physicians of potential colorectal lesions. As stated by Medtronic in the education and training materials, the GI GeniusTM Intelligent Endoscopy module can be useful in detecting small, flat lesions that otherwise cannot be detected by the physician.

NVIDIA announced in the press release that the first GI GeniusTM systems built with the NVIDIA technology will be available later in 2023.