ARTICLE SUMMARY:
NVIDIA considers medtech, and in particular, surgery, to be a core part of its healthcare strategy. It is providing the industry with a full stack of computational powers, which enable medical device companies to offer end customers, that is, healthcare providers, a new wave of innovative products.
Wall Street darling NVIDIA’s evolution from a graphics and gaming company into an artificial intelligence (AI) powerhouse incorporates medical devices as a core component of its healthcare business strategy.
Healthcare is rapidly undergoing an industrial revolution comprising multiple waves of AI innovation that compound on each other, says David Niewolny, senior director and global head of business development, healthcare, and medical devices at NVIDIA.
About 18 years ago, Jensen Huang, the CEO and founder of the company, hired an electrical engineer, Kimberly Powell (now VP and general manager, healthcare at NVIDIA), to jump-start the healthcare business, Niewolny recalls. The company initially supplied off-the-shelf GPU chips to medical imaging companies, many of which continue to rely on its technologies. About a decade ago, it dove deeper, moving past image reconstruction to AI-enabled sensing and interpretation of data from static images and speech, a field that is referred to as perception AI. Because of its heavy engagement in imaging, and because medical imaging capture is standardized through formats like DICOM, NVIDIA gained access to data sets that have been instrumental in its broader AI ambitions (see Figure 1). In 2018-2019, the company collaborated with King’s College London to create the MONAI platform, a popular open-source framework designed for applying perception AI to medical images.
The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 ushered in a new wave of generative AI, which takes interpretation of existing images a step further and creates updated content. More recently, healthcare has become enamored of two more iterations of AI innovation: agentic AI and physical AI. Agentic AI enables autonomous workflow and decision-making, while physical AI enables machines to interact directly with the physical world, as opposed to through digital cues, says Niewolny.
Medical imaging remains core to NVIDIA’s business, but its ambitions have expanded to tackling other big healthcare challenges: staffing shortages, administrative costs, and operating room efficiency and care, Niewolny says.
