The partnership aims to enhance the ISU (Intelligent Surgical Unit), part of Asensus’ performance-guided surgery offerings. Asensus designed its flagship Senhance surgical robot platform around the ISU. The real-time intraoperative surgical image analytics platform leverages augmented intelligence to reduce surgical variability. It allows the surgeon to measure anatomy, place digital tags, enhance surgical images and utilize AI-driven control of the camera.
Asensus said it linked up with Nvidia, an AI computing leader, to improve the ISU’s ability to deliver novel clinical intelligence to surgeons. Read more on Nvidia and its use of generative AI in the pharmaceutical industry here.
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina-based Asensus intends to use a broad suite of Nvidia tools to enhance ISU’s augmented intelligence capabilities. The company built the ISU with Nvidia’s accelerated computing technology. It offers real-time augmented intelligence features like digital tags, 3D measurement and enhanced camera control.
Both companies say the collaboration offers early access to relevant product roadmaps to foster synergistic development. They also plan to jointly define business models for the development, deployment and commercialization of digital surgical solutions.
What Asensus and Nvidia executives have to say about the collaboration
Asensus President and CEO Anthony Fernando says the collaboration aims to enhance ISU’s machine vision and image analytics capabilities. He also expects it to improve processing speeds and precision.
“Utilizing NVIDIA’s advanced technologies will allow us to further improve the ISU’s augmented intelligence capabilities and the roadmap of our innovative clinical applications,” Fernando said. “Through this collaboration, Asensus is furthering its vision to enhance clinical intelligence in surgery through the use of advanced augmented intelligence tools.”
Nvidia Director of Healthcare Business Development David Niewolny highlighted the healthcare industry’s move toward data generation. He said Nvidia brings a domain-specific full-stack edge AI computing platform (Holoscan) to medtech.
According to Niewolny, Holoscan optimizes real-time data and image processing, solving complex problems and improving surgeon decision-making.
“As a leading FDA-cleared solution in soft-tissue abdominal surgery, Asensus’s ISU is a perfect platform to leverage NVIDIA’s software-defined architecture to accelerate innovation and deliver new products to surgeons faster via software-as-a-medical-device applications,” Niewolny said.
