Artificial intelligence (AI) software provider NVIDIA is collaborating with healthcare technology provider Medtronic to accelerate the development of AI in healthcare and bring new AI-based solutions into patient care.

The companies will integrate NVIDIA healthcare and edge AI technologies into Medtronic’s GI Genius intelligent endoscopy module, developed and manufactured by Cosmo Pharmaceuticals. GI Genius is an FDA-cleared, AI-assisted colonoscopy tool to help physicians detect polyps that can lead to colorectal cancer.

GI Genius has been designed to host a suite of AI algorithms and integrating the NVIDIA Clara healthcare platform could allow Medtronic to scale development of algorithms for real-time procedures, potentially accelerating AI innovation for better patient care, the company says.

“Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can increase the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of global health systems,” says 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.”

Medtronic intends to integrate NVIDIA Holoscan—a real-time AI computing software platform for building medical devices—and NVIDIA IGX, an industrial-grade edge AI hardware platform, to run with its GI Genius AI-assisted colonoscopy system to support physicians with AI-enhanced diagnostic images. Holoscan helps bring the latest AI applications into clinical settings by providing the full-stack infrastructure needed for scalable, software-defined processing of streaming data at the edge.

“We believe that collaborating with AI companies and developers like NVIDIA and Cosmo is essential to driving innovation within the medical device industry,” says Giovanni Di Napoli, president of Gastrointestinal Business at Medtronic. “We are committed to working with the best and brightest minds in the field of AI to develop new technologies that can improve patient outcomes and transform the way we approach healthcare.”

The NVIDIA Holoscan and IGX platform makes software-defined medical devices possible by enabling developers to efficiently train and validate AI models within the Cosmo Innovation Center, and then host the AI-powered applications on Medtronic’s GI Genius AI Access Platform, a marketplace for software-as-a-medical-device (SaMD) applications.

The first GI Genius systems built with the NVIDIA technology will be available later this year.