CCDS Executive Director Mark Michalski with the world’s first NVIDIA DGX-1 with Volta.
Over at the NVIDIA Blog, Abdul Hamid Halabi writes that the Center for Clinical Data Science (CCDS) today received the world’s first purpose-built AI supercomputer from the all-new portfolio of NVIDIA DGX systems with Volta.
With a mission to advance medicine with artificial intelligence, CCDS includes clinicians, researchers, data scientists and product development, and translational experts. Using the first-generation DGX-1 based on Pascal GPUs, CCDS data scientists have successfully trained machines to “see” abnormalities and patterns in medical images.
CCDS data scientists have created dozens of medical training algorithms to date. In addition to radiology, they include other medical specialties such as cardiology, ophthalmology, dermatology and psychiatry.
Soon, Boston-area radiologists will have AI “assistants” integrated into their daily workflows, helping them more quickly and accurately diagnose disease from MRIs, CAT scans, X-rays and more. The trained neural networks residing on DGX-1 systems in CCDS’s data center are in a constant state of learning, continually ingesting countless medical images worldwide.
NVIDIA DGX systems assist CCDS data scientists on a variety of AI-enabled research topics including how strokes can impact the human brain.
Because trained neural networks can provide superhuman pixel-by-pixel image evaluation and analyze scores of other data with incredible speed, doctors can make more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans. For example, radiologists reviewing medical images usually review them in the order in which they were received. However, with AI-assisted imaging, it’s possible to triage the images, bringing the most troubling to the top of a radiologist’s queue.
“Today’s practitioners have a barrage of data thrown at them — lab reports, MRIs, CAT scans, family health histories and more — which makes it incredibly difficult to make decisions,” says Michalski. “So, having technology that can aid them in this effort can be incredibly transformative.”
The new DGX-1 with Volta delivers groundbreaking AI computing power three times faster than the prior DGX generation, providing the performance of up to 800 CPUs in a single system. The DGX Station, the world’s first personal supercomputer for AI development, delivers the computing capacity of 400 CPUs, consuming nearly 40x less power, in a form factor that fits neatly deskside.
