Data is now the new driving force of the modern world. How well your business performs or what its rank could be on the performance list entirely depends on how you leverage the data available, involving emerging tools such as ML, AI, and cloud! Such forces have, in turn, lit up a stand for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). 

Lately, I have had a great fortune to sit down and have an in-depth discussion with Jim Dworkin, the senior director of the cloud business unit in the Programmable Solutions Group at Intel. During our discussion, even Jim asserted that in order to unlock the potential of data, we need to embrace the latest FPGA technology. 

Further, having the modern architecture out into the right place now could easily uncover the paths to get things right. Perhaps, we need to educate ourselves on the ‘hardwiring’ of data flow to ensure we can appropriately leverage the power of data, speed time to market, diminish the costs of ownership, and a lot more that could take the businesses to new heights. 

For example, the technology Intel has been offering has virtually evolved “off-the-shelf”, so competent than ever before that it can now solve specific infrastructure or business problems.

With the embracement of FPGA latest technology and eASICs(the Intel tech discussed above), there has been an acceleration in infrastructure use cases (SmartNICs). So, what is SmartNICs? Well, SmartNICs is a programmable accelerator. It holds the capability to centre all the networking data with the utmost security and proffering storage flexibility and efficiency at the same time. 

Having SmartNIC onboard businesses hold enough power to handle more refined infrastructure workloads using cloud hosts, churning of wastage of time, and saving more resources. Besides, SmartNICs also furnish great value towards nurturing virtualized assistance, such as multi-tenant shared cloud and more.

Perhaps with hyper-scalers’ mushrooming, the overhead of network infrastructure might turn daunting. But the applications of FPGA have helped manage that. 

Apart from this, Intel has also come up with FPGA cloud SmartNIC platforms that replicate the hyper-scalers’ used architectures. So, how does it operate? 

This platform integrates Intel high-performance Stratix 10 FPGA with an Intel Xeon D processor that works together on the SmartNIC card, enabling virtual switching by offering the Tier-2 data centres a mass-market solution. 

Intel has also been heavily sponsoring more efficient AI via recommender systems and natural language processing. It has even established a more robust form of FPGA, which is able to interpret voice coder inputs. 

Jim contends that the enactment of a GPU manages to be modal and established on the micro-architecture constructed around it, irrespective of their power. Therefore if it shifts from an optimization point, latencies might rise, negatively impacting the performance of speech processing. 

FPGA applications are virtually inexhaustible, particularly with FPGA transition reaching up to par with software programming in ease of usage. 

Jim is optimistic about exploding evolution. He believes people wouldn’t be asking what SmartNIC platforms are. Instead would be keener towards knowing how transformative it could be. But if you ask me, I would still say the real excitement lies in accessing Intel’s technology and then jumping to Microsoft Azure to revise and enjoy leaner and faster service completely.

With his extensive product knowledge of large-scale integration work, Jim puts it; we must decode problems at a strategic level and not in a microcosm.

Further Reading

• Tune into the full podcast of my conversation with Jim Dworkin
• Intel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) products web portal
• Intel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) products page
• Intel eASIC N5X Application Specific Integrated Circuit Devices web portal

Healthcare is teeming with data. We have all witnessed pictures of ICUs with multiple devices scrutinizing critical statistics, displaying readings, and chiming warnings. But what we often overlook is that data that rolls off the mesh and is not collared. If you’re acquainted or aware of data analytics, you would be able to apprehend the value that comes from collaring, marking, and interpreting that information. 

I had the amicable opportunity to converse with Dr. Emma Fauss, Cofounder and CEO of Medical Informatics Corp., and discuss how capturing and analyzing this data has transformed healthcare and how this changeover has evolved specifically consequential during a global pandemic. To know the bits and bytes of our conversation related to data analytics in healthcare industry, make sure you listen to our podcast via the link shared below. 

A couple of decades back, Emma cofounded MIC with Dr. Craig Rusin and formed their Sickbay solution. Sickbay permits users to draw together the previously deleted and lost data and leverage it to furnish patient administration functionality and administrative advancements and enhance the patient’s medical journal.

There’s presumably existed a requirement for analytics in the healthcare industry for ages, but it has been technologically challenging to organize and hold the data at such a high scale. Further, individuals have loomed the crisis by pouring to acquire as much information as feasible in any possible form or manner without truly comprehending the end-use matter. Previous endeavors have taken one machine and assembled one dashboard for that device. Following this reason, you end up with multiple machines right next to the bedside, all attached to different dashboards, which wasn’t scalable.

MIC germinated from an investigation ground with a specific service case. If they could identify the routine on the mesh for witnessing circumstances, they could determine those sub-acute customs in the betterment and provide healthcare experts early alarm. The significance begins to rise exponentially when you merge the data across machines.

INTEL

MIC was presented to Intel via another technology counterpart in 2019 and is ecstatic to partner with such a symbiotic ally. Emma’s knowledge as an engineer implies she always had a fondness towards Intel and their mastership to “assemble items in the ranking hierarchy of nanometers”. Intel assisted MIC to open a Blue Ocean of untried types of data analytics that could be scaled up, deployed, commercialized, and suggested that prototypes could be devised in a matter of span.

Rather than spending decades on developing a medical gimmick, they can, in periodic months, conceive and construct a prototype that can be utilized in real-time. Intel also enabled its protection schemes and looked at methods to enforce federated data standards.

COVID19

When the pandemic transpired, the Intel team was keen to provide the necessary support and glimpsed an opportunity to team up with MIC.

Bryce Olson, the Global Strategist for the Intel Health and Life Sciences Group, visited healthcare providers, questioning what they required when feedback concerning their misery pinpoints instantly led to the Sickbay answer.

Here is a few feedback that included in the hospital responses:

Infirmaries were swamped with patients and laboured to mount their team to conform to patients’ requirements.

Restricted stockpiles of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) implied capping staff interactions with patients.

Because COVID19 is extremely infectious, medical staffers who were straight in contact with patients were at elevated risk, and if they contracted the virus, that indicated more irregular personnel are obtainable to minister patients.

During this pandemic period, time was of the substance. Infirmaries required devices to quickly obtain all their proprietary patient health records from disparate bedside machines into one screened vista.

In connection to Intel’s $50 million pandemic retort, Intel and MIC established the Scale to Serve Program to support 100 infirmaries continually installing MIC’s Sickbay outlet. Some of the remarkable attributes of Sickbay comprise:

Sickbay is the sole scalable, FDA-cleared clinical administration and analytics outlet developed for ICUs.

The Scale to Serve Program enables infirmaries to remotely observe ICU patients across agents, departments, and establishments, so infirmary staff can look after more patients at once while lowering their peril of exposure to COVID19.

It employs Intel Xeon processor-based outlets to furnish data visualization and analytics and can be attained by healthcare workers operating any affiliated desktop, notepad, or mobile device.

There wasn’t a moment where the MIC team said, “do we do this or not?”. Emma stated it was pleasing to observe how engineers and science coupled up to resolve things. 

Acquiring an alliance behind such a modification can be an arduous job from a logistics and planning, administration, and technology standpoint. Because of the product’s path and scalability, it’s clear that the development can be nestled in a day. But it’s all the additional elements across an institution that must be dragged concurrently. Nevertheless, the skillfulness and scalability of the answer surprised consumers.

Emma says they desired to drive an accessible medical device integration. “You shouldn’t have to set a completely fresh set of hardware in the space when you’ve already subsidized a lot in your web structure”.

CONCESSIONS

Medics can scrutinize the crazes and the real-time data in healthcare industry of the patient and provide sustenance direction remotely without undervaluing the grade of care. Consolidating immediate contact also diminishes the drain on lacking aids such as PPE.

The secondary advantage is that you can leverage caregivers at abodes and those under quarantine. Moreover, you can access caregivers who are potentially in other states, which provides tremendous flexibility as we see the strain on health care aids ebb and course across provinces with multiple tides of the COVID19 pandemic.

The threat reduction by utilizing virtual ICU technology is extensive.

Today a very small percentage of data developed by patients is driven into the electronic health record, compelling medics to function without having the complete picture. Sickbay opens that data to permit predictive analytics, AI and machine learning applications, remote patient monitoring, eventually enabling providers to devise a new care benchmark.

COVID19 has consolidated the instantaneous requirement to decrease dealings in space and scrutinize aid restrictions differently. Scanning more patients with minimal face-to-face dealings without renouncing the grade of care, surveying numerous patients at one time, and leveraging data for the patient course, analytics, and threat scoring.

UNDERSTANDINGS

The Sickbay forum was approximately before the pandemic, but its components distinctively assisted the requirements of this global crisis by permitting infirmaries to handle those challenges.

One of the greatest understandings has been that once an institution has a scalable structure, it can acclimate to a spectrum of diverse scenarios in a matter of days/hours. Therefore, it places institutions to deal with pandemics and further scenarios that might come into space. And by employing predictive analytics and vacating the obligation of management, the solution enables it to bear a favourable influence on the care crew, the patient, and the lowest line.

I want to show my gratitude to Emma, her team, and the entire crew of Intel for gathering together to make this interview a success. Please tune in to the discussion at the link mentioned below and employ the additional aids to comprehend our discussed technology and innovations more.

Also Read:

• Tune into my podcast conversation with Emma Fauss
• Medical Informatics Corp. Website
• Intel and Medical Informatics Corp. response to COVID19

Data is at the beginning, middle, end of healthcare’s future. Some feel like healthcare is playing catch up to other industries that digitally transformed earlier, such as financial services, but I see healthcare as perfectly positioned to benefit from a raft of proven business cases and technology. That’s where Siemens Healthineers come in.

I had the good fortune to interview Peter Shen, VP Business Development, Digital Health, Siemens Healthineers, to talk about everything that’s happening in his world of healthcare technology at the moment. You can listen to our full podcast conversation at the link below. 

What is Siemens Healthineers

A few years ago, Siemens global decided that their healthcare division, which has for decades produced some of the world’s best imaging and diagnostic equipment, would do even better if it had more freedom to explore new technologies and partnerships. And so Siemens Healthineers was born: Engineers + Health sciences on a mission to best leverage new technologies to help clinicians and their patients.

Siemens are renowned for their ingenuity and innovation but even they can’t do it all, and they’re well aware of that. Their goal in building the Healthineers was not to be limited. They didn’t WANT to become specialists in data infrastructure, they wanted to further develop their own unique capabilities in health sciences algorithmic problem solving. 

As Peter says, “Our focus is on the healthcare side. We needed a partner for our digitalisation strategy to help make sure the infrastructure was there.” So, they invited Intel to their newly built AI think tank in the US and had a conversation that turned into an incredibly fruitful partnership. 

Together, Siemens Healthineers and Intel are working to help clinicians expand precision medicine to be more accurate in their diagnosis, to transform how they deliver care, and above all, to improve the patient experience, based on the things that matter to patients.

Did I mention data?

Siemens Healthineers Benefits

The Healthineers engineering team processes enormous amounts of data, piles of it. They’ll look at a patient scenario, such as a respiratory issue, and think through the algorithms they could run to try to diagnose the condition. They work backwards to determine the data set and data requirements and forward to develop the algorithms. They might decide that 30 or even 40 algorithms are required to arrive at useful diagnostic information for the doctor to review. And those algorithms have to run in an enormously timely manner, because they are also trying to reduce turn time – between running tests and having not just the results but the interpretations in hand as quickly as possible, because that’s important to patients and time could be of the essence. 

Digital twins are becoming part of this exercise, too. In order for the models to generate useful diagnostic information, they have to ingest a full picture of the patient’s current health and medical history. Just imagine the memory, storage and compute required for that! Well, the Healthineers engineers were tremendously thankful that they didn’t have to – they could work side by side with Intel engineers, sharing their use cases and requirements and leveraging the tremendous compute power of Intel solutions to make it happen. 

I can only imagine the “eureka” moments between the engineering team, sheer magic. Peter confirms: “These are really fun conversations,” he says, “Our engineers can run as many simulations as they need to get the results clinicians want,” to make an accurate timely diagnosis.

But back to data. As with many other industries, there’s almost too much of it, and it’s not in the right format for analysis. “Providers need to use this [clinical and operational data] but first they have to extract it,” says Peter. And Siemen’s devices are contributing a lot of data too. Part of the challenge is then, “how to make those devices deliver the right information back to providers so that they can make decisions. The data varies widely from a static xray to a beating heart that you’re trying to figure out the volume of blood going through the ventricles and you’re trying to do calculations while it’s moving. Trying to ingest all of these different types of data and draw conclusions from it is difficult.” 

Fortunately, I feel as though the patient themselves is on the side of technology advancements in healthcare. We are all tethered to a digital device, we’re comfortable with digital information and we expect healthcare to be part of that cultural shift. For example, in Australia, with our far flung population, we’d absolutely welcome advances in remote care. Peter talks about specialists being able to remotely operate an advanced imaging device located thousands of miles away – I think that’s fantastic. Instead of flying patients into the big city as we do now, we could “teleport” the doctor to the patient.

I get a very strong “can-do” spirit from Peter. Some of the challenges his team face are specific to healthcare but some are being tackled in other industries as well, such as image and video analysis, and I’m confident that their startup mentality and interest in partnerships will continue to help them solve this problem more quickly through co-create thinking. I encourage you to listen to our full conversation and let me know what you think. My thanks to Peter and the entire team at Siemens Healthineers and Intel for making the interview possible. 

Reference links:

• Episode of the Conversations with Dez #podcast show featuring Peter Shen
• Siemens Healthineers digital health web portal
• Intel Open Vino toolkit
• Intel market ready Internet of Things (IoT) solutions