According to a top executive at chip giant Nvidia, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has already sparked a “healthcare revolution” and is poised to revolutionise everything from patient diagnostics and post-operative care to pharmaceutical research.

Although it is still “early days,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia, stated on Wednesday that AI would likely have a greater impact on healthcare than any other aspect of life.

Powell stated, “It is likely that the most significant application of generative AI will be in healthcare,” during Nvidia’s AI Summit, which took place in Taipei alongside the Computex trade show.

According to Powell, artificial intelligence is already having an impact on the lengthy and expensive process of creating and testing new medications, which can take up to 15 years and $2 billion at present.

“We care about fast and fast means in this industry, that we’ll be able to do more, and we know that drug discovery is essentially an infinite problem. You’re looking at a chemical space and 10 to the 60th power potential chemical compounds,” Powell said.

“This is essentially an infinite compute. Probably, the only way to intelligently search that space is through generative data.”

According to Powell, AI might be used to predict potential interactions between novel chemical compounds and the body, which could help lower the current 90 percent failure rate of most medications in clinical trials.

She stated, “With generative AI, we’re going to be able to model biology in new and exciting ways so that when we put a new chemical entity into the clinic, we have a higher success rate. We’re going to be able to generate more ideas and predict with better accuracy.”

Nvidia, the third-biggest firm in the world based on stock valuation, has turned a significant portion of its operations towards healthcare in an effort to leverage artificial intelligence’s many potential uses.

A suite of platforms, software, and medical equipment have been developed by the California-based business to help medical professionals in fields including digital imaging, diagnostic scanning, and robot-assisted surgery.

The business signed agreements in March with Johnson & Johnson and GE Healthcare, respectively, on the application of AI in surgery and medical imaging.

According to Powell, self-driving cars currently employ comparable technologies to convert unprocessed data into actionable decisions.

“Autonomous vehicles, robotic surgery, and ultrasounds are not all that unlike from one another. Decisions are being made in real time since a lot of sensor data is being received, the speaker stated.

According to Powell, generative AI will also be essential in the postoperative and follow-up phases of medical therapy, such as when creating a post-treatment report using patient data or evaluating a previous surgery to determine its success.

“There’s six to 12 people in that room operating and making decisions in real-time. And then, just like sports – a lot of athletes do this at the end of the game – surgeons also go back and look at the surgery to understand what they could have done better,” she said.

“You can imagine how generative AI is going to have really important utility in every stage of surgery.”

The surge in AI investment spurred by Nvidia’s graphics processing units has transformed the formerly unknown startup into a roughly $3 trillion business in a matter of years.

With the publication of OpenAI’s ground-breaking programme ChatGPT last year, generative AI sprang to fame, sparking both excitement and apprehension about the technology’s possible uses.

(Adapted from Aljazeera.com)