Medtronic Accelerates Real-Time Medical AI

Medtronic collaborates with NVIDIA to accelerate the development of AI in the healthcare system and bring new AI-based solutions into patient care. Its GI Genius™ intelligent endoscopy system, developed and manufactured by Cosmo, is the first of its systems to use NVIDIA Holoscan—a real-time edge AI computing software platform for building medical devices—and NVIDIA IGX Orin™, an industrial-grade edge AI hardware platform. Integrated into the GI Genius system, this represents a significant advancement in software-defined medical device technology, designed and optimized as a cohesive platform to accelerate time to market. Holoscan is included with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the software layer of NVIDIA IGX Orin, providing expertise and support to all levels of the IGX™ platform at all stages of development and deployment. This long-term whole-stack software support accelerates enterprises to the leading edge of AI, while also simplifying production AI to make it accessible to every enterprise. The next-gen GI Genius module from Medtronic, powered by NVIDIA, provides sophisticated AI-driven insights designed to help, standardize, and support clinical procedures.

Medtronic, in partnership with the developer and engineering team at Cosmo, identified a critical opportunity to enable AI to deliver accuracy of finer high-value, contextual, and interpretable data that physicians could use to enhance the findings, thereby aiming to improve the quality of patient outcomes. To optimize this AI application, the team needed a transparent, bidirectional pipeline to ensure the effectiveness of real-time data exchanges. Medtronic’s initiative hinged on developing a comprehensive, robust AI platform capable of executing interactive, scalable AI applications.

Three critical requirements were identified in the development of this program:

• Provision of an efficient, user-friendly software development environment that could be accessed by both internal Medtronic developers and external third-party developers
• Standardizing the hardware and software stack for easy validation and certification, which would ensure broad market accessibility
• Assurance that the uniform hardware and software configuration remained robust and compliant to meet regulatory certification

The Cosmo team integrated Holoscan into Medtronic’s GI Genius intelligent endoscopy system to accelerate AI development and bring the latest AI applications into clinical settings by leveraging Holoscan and its full-stack infrastructure needed for scalable, software-defined processing of streaming data at the clinical edge. Holoscan supports Medtronic’s GI Genius (™) AI Access™ program, an AI marketplace fostering a partner ecosystem of developers, enabling rapid adaptation of SaMD applications in clinical settings while minimizing development costs.

Medtronic’s GI Genius module also runs on NVIDIA IGX, a medical-grade edge AI platform that combines enterprise-level hardware, software, and support. Together, Holoscan and IGX enabled the launch of Medtronic’s next-generation hardware, which uses enhanced AI capabilities designed to deliver assistance to physicians during colonoscopy to screen for polyps to real-time procedures to help improve early detection.

Positioned strategically within the data flow between the video processor and the display interface, the Medtronic GI Genius module operates in a pass-through configuration, allowing the video stream to proceed unaltered. Simultaneously, the GI Genius module includes the capability to accept, process, and integrate AI-driven analysis within the video feed. This computational functionality is designed to append a real-time overlay onto the video output, thereby enhancing the depth of information available during the endoscopic procedure.

Additionally, the GI Genius module will have the potential to host applications developed by vetted third-party developers, readily accessible to physicians. This empowers healthcare professionals with the flexibility to select the most suitable applications before initiating a procedure. Through the sophisticated GI Genius AI Access platform interface, powered by the high-performance, unified edge AI NVIDIA Holoscan platform, developers can construct bespoke applications for distribution to Medtronic’s ecosystem.

NVIDIA Holoscan and IGX provided Medtronic and its development partner, Cosmo, with a streamlined architecture that removed the need for building a full-stack, real-time sensor processing platform from the ground up. This resulted in a swift, seamless transition across the development-production-deployment continuum and allowed them to reallocate resources toward developing competitive software and features that could expedite the delivery of finalized applications to their end users.

Capitalizing on this success, Medtronic and Cosmo are creating new opportunities for developers to build new, relevant, and responsible AI for the GI Genius module to help physicians benefit from tools developed by a community of experts for a wide range of clinical uses.

Learn more about the AI Access program at Genius Academy.