UK's most powerful supercomputer launched to accelerate brain research
The supercomputer, NVIDIA’s Cambridge-1, has been launched with founding partners including King’s College London and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust.
Cambridge-1 enables scientists and healthcare experts to use the powerful combination of AI and simulation to carry out ground-breaking research to the benefit of patients.
As founding partners of Cambridge-1, King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust are using the supercomputer to teach AI models to generate synthetic brain images by learning from thousands of MRI brain scans, from patients of various ages and with different medical conditions.
This computer-generated data will enable a more nuanced understanding of what diseases such as dementia, stroke, brain cancer and multiple sclerosis look like, potentially leading to earlier and more accurate diagnosis.
Prof Sebastien Ourselin, Head of the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King’s College London, said:
Having a partnership in place between a large company like NVIDIA and the NHS will help to solve two major issues: access to data and access to power.
Through this partnership, we will be able to use a scale of computational power that is unprecedented in healthcare research. It will be truly transformational for the health and treatment of patients.
Carried out in close collaboration with the NHS and biomedical database, UK Biobank, the research leverages several of the UK’s world-leading healthcare resources. King’s College London will share the synthetic data model with the research and start-up community to accelerate research.
Prof Ian Abbs, Chief Executive Officer of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, said:
The power of artificial intelligence in healthcare will help to speed up diagnosis for patients, improve services such as breast cancer screening, and support the way that we risk assess and prioritise patients according to clinical need.
We are excited about our involvement in the Cambridge-1 data centre as it will enable us to be amongst the first to benefit from these new AI capabilities — using the very latest technology to benefit our patients, as well as manage precious resources more efficiently.
Cambridge-1 represents a $100 million investment for NVIDIA. In addition to King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, launch partners include AstraZeneca, GSK and Oxford Nanopore Technologies. NVIDIA will collaborate with researchers to make much of the work available to the greater scientific community.
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said:
Cambridge-1 will empower world-leading researchers in business and academia with the ability to perform their life’s work on the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, unlocking clues to disease and treatments at a scale and speed previously impossible in the UK. The discoveries developed on Cambridge-1 will take shape in the UK, but the impact will be global, driving ground-breaking research that has the potential to benefit millions around the world.
At King’s Health Partners Neurosciences we are using our collective expertise to become a global top ten Neurosciences Institute, demonstrated through excellence in research, education and clinical practice.