Las Vegas, NV. – Recently, Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare and life sciences at NVIDIA, was a keynote speaker at the seventh annual HLTH conference — one of the largest healthcare conferences — in Las Vegas, Nevada, covering innovations from a variety of medically relevant topics, such as health policy, care delivery and emerging technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). As a premiere global conference for the healthcare industry, HLTH’s 12,000+ attendees included C-suite executives, VPs, directors, managers and healthcare professionals from a diverse group of health providers and systems, insurance companies, investors, start-ups and policy organizations.
Combining AI and Healthcare: Hospital Digital Twins
Kimberly Powell spoke about the promising future of artificial intelligence and hospital digital twins currently under development at NVIDIA. Digital twins are virtual replicas of a physical counterpart, such as a hospital or city. They incorporate real-time, multimodal data from the physical environment to provide a representative simulation in its virtual environment. One of the many advantages of digital twins is that they can help with continuous intelligent monitoring, AI-assisted analysis of medical data and alert healthcare professionals of patient risks sooner using predictive analytics to improve patient outcomes.
Putting UF on the “virtual” map — IC3 researchers create a digital twin of UF Health hospital
Due to the incredible partnership between NVIDIA, Mark III, and the University of Florida (UF), an intelligent digital twin of UF Health’s NeuroICU unit is currently in progress and making huge strides for AI & healthcare. The director of UF’s Intelligent Clinical Care Center (IC3) Azra Bihorac, MD MS FCCM FASN and co-director Parisa Rashidi, PhD and IC3 researchers are bringing their renowned AI and clinical expertise to pioneer this intelligent digital twin with NVIDIA and Mark III. Previously, Dr. Bihorac has described this transformative digital twin as “…the first step towards our vision to create a health care metaverse for optimizing patient care, health care processes and smart hospital spaces of the future using the power of AI.”
This UF Health digital twin will be a complete replica of its physical counterpart and able to incorporate real-time patient data to optimize and improve clinical decisions and patient care. With continual development, UF’s intelligent digital twin will be able to serve as a virtual command center for healthcare professionals and even provide immersive medical training that will enable physicians to practice medical procedures in a risk-free environment, ultimately leading to improved patient care.