Japan is using AI tools to provide high-quality healthcare to its population of around 30% people who are 65 or older. Breakthrough technology deployments by the country’s healthcare leaders including in AI-accelerated drug discovery, genomic medicine, healthcare imaging, and robotics are highlighted at the NVIDIA AI Summit Japan. AI scanners and scopes give radiologists and surgeons real-time superpowers. Japanese surgical AI companies are investigating the use of Holoscan to power applications that could detect anatomical structures like organs in real-time. Fujifilm has launched NURA, a group of health screening centers with AI-augmented medical examinations designed to help doctors test for cancer and chronic diseases. Developed using NVIDIA DGX systems, the tool incorporates large language models that create text summaries of medical images.
AI tools trained on country-specific data and local compute infrastructure are supercharging the abilities of Japan’s clinicians and researchers amid an expected shortage of nearly 500,000 healthcare workers by next year.
Powered by NVIDIA AI computing platforms like the Tokyo-1 NVIDIA DGX supercomputer, these applications were developed using domain-specific platforms.
NVIDIA is supporting Japan’s pharmaceutical market with NVIDIA BioNeMo, an end-to-end platform that enables drug discovery researchers to develop and deploy AI models for generating biological intelligence from biomolecular data.
Tokyo-based Astellas Pharma uses BioNeMo biomolecular AI models to accelerate biologics research. Astellas has accelerated chemical molecule generation by more than 30x. The company plans to use BioNeMo NIM microservices to further advance its work.
Genomics researchers across Japan have adopted the NVIDIA Parabricks software suite to accelerate secondary analysis of DNA and RNA data. The University of Tokyo Human Genome Center uses it to find gene variants unique to Japan’s population.
Fujifilm has developed an AI application in collaboration with NVIDIA to help surgeons perform surgery more efficiently by converting CT images into 3D simulations to support surgery.
Olympus recently collaborated with NVIDIA and NTT to demonstrate how cloud-connected endoscopes can efficiently run image processing and AI applications in real-time.
NVIDIA is also supporting real-time AI-powered robotic systems for radiology and surgery in Japan with Holoscan, a sensor processing platform that streamlines AI model and application development for real-time insights.
Fujifilm has launched NURA, a group of health screening centers with AI-augmented medical examinations designed to help doctors test for cancer and chronic diseases with faster examinations and lower radiation doses for CT scans.