GPU and system chips manufacturer NVIDIA has released a new blockchain and artificial intelligence-based computing platform that assists healthcare providers in reducing the analyses of complex 3D models from hours to minutes.
The ‘intelligent edge’ platform, called Clara Federated Learning, brings deep learning models to the healthcare industry and runs on the company’s EGX Intelligent platform.
NVIDIA Explores New Sectors
NVIDIA’s Nvidia Vice President of Healthcare, Kimberly Powell, made the announcement via a blog post highlighting the issue of gaining access to the large volumes of data required to train AI models. She described the operation of the platform as follows:
“In the U.K., NVIDIA is partnering with King’s College London and Owkin to create a federated learning platform for the National Health Service. The Owkin Connect platform running on NVIDIA Clara enables algorithms to travel from one hospital to another, training on local datasets. It provides each hospital a blockchain-distributed LEDGER that captures and traces all data used for model training.”
The distributed collaborative AI system ensures that the data remains within the network of healthcare providers. Each client on the network can use the platform to perform deep learning training on their own but can also collaborate with other clients to provide a more accurate global model.
Among other use cases, Clara will let hospitals form more accurate and rapid models in imaging and genomic sequencing.
Blockchain Has Tremendous Potential in the Healthcare Industry
Blockchain solutions for the healthcare industry are plentiful and consequential, with many projects emphasizing the advantages of data privacy, data accessibility, and increasing computational speeds that distributed systems can bring. The technology is often spoken of in association with AI, and the two complement each other well.
IBM, like NVIDIA, has also displayed interest in providing blockchain-based solutions for the healthcare industry and even announced a consortium that includes PNC Bank, Health Care Service Corporation, Aetna, and Anthem as members. Built on the Hyperledger Fabric, the system is intended to reduce administrative errors and assist with record-keeping.
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