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AI, Computational Advances Ring In New Era for Healthcare

This is an excerpt of an article published at NVIDIA. Read the full article here.

NVIDIA’s Kimberly Powell, at J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference, describes how AI and accelerated computing are advancing the discovery and practice of medicine.

We’re at a pivotal moment to unlock a new, AI-accelerated era of discovery and medicine, says Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA’s vice president of healthcare.

Understanding disease and discovering therapies is our greatest human endeavor, she said — and the trillion-dollar drug discovery industry illustrates just how complex a challenge it is.

How AI Can Drive Down Drug Discovery Costs

The typical drug discovery process takes about a decade, costs $2 billion and suffers a 90 percent failure rate during clinical development. But the rise of digital data in healthcare in recent years presents an opportunity to improve those statistics with AI.

“We can produce today more biomedical data in about three months than the entire 300-year history of healthcare,” she said. “And so this is now becoming a problem that no human really can synthesize that level of data, and we need to call upon artificial intelligence.” 

Powell called AI “the most powerful technology force of our time. It’s software that writes software that no humans can.”

But AI works best when it’s domain specific, combining data and algorithms tailored to a specific field like radiology, pathology or patient monitoring.

“The tremendous focus of AI on a single problem in 2020, like COVID-19, really showed us that with that tremendous focus, we can see every piece and part that can benefit from artificial intelligence,” she said.

Read the whole article here.

Written by Isha Salian, NVIDIA

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