The Medical Open Network for AI (MONAI), an open source framework for AI and deep learning software tools to be used in healthcare imaging research applications, is gaining more traction among healthcare institutions.
The free, Pytorch-based, community backed framework has been downloaded more than 650,000 times since it was released in 2020 by an international consortium led by Nvidia and King's College London. MONAI also can work with the Federated Learning Application Runtime Environment, another software tool developed and later placed in the open source community by Nvidia.
Now, MONAI is being expanded with new capabilities, including a MONAI Application Package (MAP), which is accessible through MONAI Deploy, a solution for developing packaging, testing, deploying, and running medical AI applications in clinical production. This addresses the existing challenges of integrating newly-created MONAI models into clinical workflows.
was developed by the MONAI Deploy working group, a team of experts from more than a dozen medical imaging institutions, to benefit AI app developers, as well as the clinical and infrastructure platforms that run AI apps. An Nvidia blog post stated that when a developer packages an app using the MONAI Deploy Application software development kit, hospitals can easily run it on premises or in the cloud. The MAPs specification also integrates with healthcare IT standards such as DICOM for medical imaging interoperability.
“Until now, most AI models would remain in an R&D loop, rarely reaching patient care,” said Jorge Cardoso, chief technology officer at the London Medical Imaging & AI Centre for Value-Based Healthcare. “MONAI Deploy will help break that loop, making impactful clinical AI a more frequent reality.”
Some of the healthcare institutions now using MONAI deploy and MAP include:
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Cincinnati Children’s Hospital: The academic medical center is creating a MAP for an AI model that automates total cardiac volume segmentation from CT images, aiding pediatric heart transplant patients in a project funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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National Health Service in England: The NHS Trusts have deployed its MONAI-based AI Deployment Engine platform, known as AIDE, across four hospitals to provide AI-enabled disease-detection tools to healthcare professionals serving 5 million patients a year.
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Qure.ai: A member of the NVIDIA Inception program for startups, Qure.ai develops medical imaging AI models for use cases including lung cancer, traumatic brain injuries and tuberculosis. The company is using MAPs to package its solutions for deployment, accelerating its time to clinical impact.
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SimBioSys: The Chicago-based Inception startup builds 3D virtual representations of patients’ tumors and is using MAPs for precision medicine AI applications that can help predict how a patient will respond to a specific treatment.
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University of California, San Francisco: UCSF is developing MAPs for several AI models, with applications including hip fracture detection, liver and brain tumor segmentation, and knee and breast cancer classification.
A number of public cloud platforms also support MONAI Deploy and MAPs, including:
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Amazon HealthLake Imaging: The MAP connector has been integrated with the HealthLake Imaging service, allowing clinicians to view, process and segment medical images in real time.
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Google Cloud: Google Cloud’s Medical Imaging Suite, designed to make healthcare imaging data more accessible, interoperable and useful, has integrated MONAI into its platform to enable clinicians to deploy AI-assisted annotation tools that help automate the highly manual and repetitive task of labeling medical images.
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Nuance Precision Imaging Network, powered by Microsoft Azure: This week’s news comes just two weeks after Nuance and Nvidia recently announced a partnership bringing together MONAI and the Nuance Precision Imaging Network, a cloud platform that provides more than 12,000 healthcare facilities with access to AI-powered tools and insights.
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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Oracle and Nvidia recently announced a collaboration to bring accelerated compute solutions for healthcare, including MONAI Deploy, to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Developers can start building MAPs with MONAI Deploy today using Nvidia containers on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.