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Johnson & Johnson on Monday he announced that he is working Nvidia develop and expand new artificial intelligence applications for surgery.
J&J’s MedTech unit and Nvidia plan to integrate artificial intelligence into devices and platforms from pre-op to post-op to ensure surgeons have access to all the information they need, said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia. For example, companies are using artificial intelligence to analyze surgical videos and automate the time-consuming documentation required after a procedure.
“There is the ability to use all sources of data within an operating room, whether it’s your voice, or video from a camera inside the body, or elsewhere, to take advantage of the generative moment of “artificial intelligence that we’re in,” Powell told CNBC in an interview.
J&J’s MedTech unit creates tools and solutions for conditions such as heart failure, kidney disease and stroke, and its technology is used in more than 75 million procedures each year, the company told CNBC. Powell said Nvidia has been in the medical device and imaging industry for more than a decade.
Shan Jegatheeswaran, vice president and global head of digital at J&J MedTech, said that just one minute of surgical video is equivalent to about 25 CT scans, so having the computing power and infrastructure to annotate and widely share such videos will be powerful for surgeons.
In the short term, he said deidentification and video enhancement can help educate and train surgeons. In the long term, analytics can be overlaid on video to provide real-time decision support. More accessible surgical videos mean that residents will not have to depend solely on the intuition and availability of the most experienced physicians at their institutions.
“Think about athletes. They watch game tape and they get better over time as they watch themselves,” Jegatheeswaran told CNBC in an interview. “This is kind of a starting point. This is the holy grail in the short term.”
Powell said the collaboration is in its “early innings” and that many applications will take time to fine-tune and deploy securely. However, he said non-diagnostic use cases, such as automating paperwork, will help save surgeons time and make a difference “right away.”
“I think all of us patients should be really excited that this kind of technology is going to be able to come in and be affordable for all doctors, all hard-working nurses and all healthcare workers,” Powell said. “They will have the best tools and information at their disposal.”