Nvidia’s MONAI platform is making AI-powered medical imaging easier for hospitals

Medical imaging leader Siemens Healthineers has integrated Nvidia’s MONAI Deploy platform across 15,000 devices globally, dramatically reducing AI deployment time for radiological imaging analysis from months to mere clicks.

The big picture: MONAI, Nvidia’s open-source platform for medical imaging AI applications, is transforming the processing of 3.6 billion annual imaging tests worldwide to help physicians manage increasing workloads and improve patient outcomes.

• Siemens Healthineers has implemented MONAI Deploy across its Syngo Carbon and syngo.via platforms, enabling rapid deployment of AI tools for analyzing X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs
• The integration allows healthcare providers to quickly implement trained AI models in clinical settings
• MONAI Deploy simplifies the development and integration of medical imaging AI applications into clinical workflows with minimal coding required

Technical capabilities: MONAI version 1.4 introduces powerful new foundation models that can be customized and deployed as Nvidia NIM microservices.

• MAISI (Medical AI for Synthetic Imaging) generates high-resolution 3D CT images and anatomic segmentations using latent diffusion AI
• VISTA-3D provides accurate CT image segmentation covering over 120 organ classes with zero-shot learning capabilities
• The new MONAI Multi-Modal Model (M3) framework enhances large language models with specialized medical AI features

Industry adoption: Major healthcare institutions and technology providers worldwide are implementing MONAI to advance medical imaging capabilities.

• Notable adopters include the German Cancer Research Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the University of Colorado School of Medicine
• The platform has achieved over 3.5 million downloads in its five-year history
• MONAI is now available through major cloud platforms including AWS HealthImaging, Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Expert perspective: Axel Heitland, head of digital technologies and research at Siemens Healthineers, notes that MONAI Deploy enables researchers to quickly customize AI models and transition innovations from laboratory to clinical practice.

Future implications: The widespread adoption of MONAI across major healthcare institutions and cloud platforms signals a significant shift toward AI-powered medical imaging analysis, though questions remain about training requirements for medical staff and the integration of these tools into existing workflows.