This video is part of our GTC Fall 2021 coverage.
Innovation in medical device technology combined with AI is giving healthcare professionals better decision-making tools to deliver care in robot-assisted surgery, interventional radiology, radiation therapy planning and more.
NVIDIA Clara Holoscan, a new computing platform for the healthcare industry, powered by NVIDIA AGX Orin, provides the computational infrastructure needed for scalable, software-defined, end-to-end processing of streaming data from medical devices.
NVIDIA Clara Holoscan is a computational platform for intelligent software-defined medical devices that combines an advanced computing system architecture with the application frameworks, libraries, and SDKs to optimize every stage of the processing pipeline. These include high-performance signal processing, accelerated AI inference, and real-time graphics visualization. NVIDIA Clara Holoscan seamlessly bridges medical instruments with the data center, supporting innovators building signal processing, AI inference and visualization workflows for a software-defined medical device ecosystem that spans radiology, ultrasound, endoscopy, robotic surgery, patient monitoring, and beyond.
NVIDIA Clara Holoscan accelerates each of these phases:
- High-speed I/O: NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA through NVIDIA ConnectX SmartNICs or third-party PCI Express cards allows for streaming data directly to the GPU memory for ultra-low-latency downstream processing.
- Physics processing: Once the data has been transmitted to the GPU, CUDA-X and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server accelerate physics-based calculations or AI processing to transform the sensor data into the image domain — for example, through image reconstruction in X-ray and CT, or beamforming in ultrasound.
- Image processing: Image data is fed into AI models using NVIDIA Triton to detect, classify, segment or track objects.
- Data processing: By combining image data streaming from the sensor with other previously acquired images using the NVIDIA cuCIM library, developers can perform registration or enhance the data with supplemental information like electronic health records.
- Rendering: The device data and resulting predictions can be visualized in 3D, in real time with Clara Render Server — or as an interactive cinematic render in NVIDIA Omniverse or in augmented reality with CloudXR — for example, to give clinicians a better picture of an organ or tumor being segmented.