NVIDIA announced in a press release 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 Genius^TM 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’re collaborating 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 driving better patient outcomes.”

In NVIDIA’s technical blog titled “How Edge Computing is Transforming Healthcare, edge computing is described as being intended to overcome issues and drawbacks associated with bandwidth congestion, network reliability, latency, and other issues associated with remote data analysis by analyzing and developing treatment solutions 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 can lead to significant benefits in the healthcare industry, where it has been estimated that there are 10-15 edge devices connected to each hospital bed.  NVIDIA states in this blog that it expects that the global market for connected medical devices will grow to $158 billion in 2022, up from $41 billion in 2017.

The reported developer and manufacturer of the GI Genius^TM Intelligent Endoscopy Module – Cosmo Pharmaceuticals NV – states in a press release that the GI Genius^TM Intelligent Endoscopy Module is an FDA cleared AI-assisted colonoscopy tool designed to help physicians detect lesions that can lead to colorectal cancer by improving diagnostic imaging used during colonoscopy procedures.  Cosmo states that the GI Genius^TM 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 Genius^TM Intelligent Endoscopy Module.

Medtronic states in its education and training materials that the GI Genius^TM 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 Genius^TM Intelligent Endoscopy Module may be useful for detecting small, flat lesions that may otherwise not be detected by the doctor.

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