How HPC Solutions are Revolutionizing Healthcare
While HPC Solutions have long been used in industries such as robotics and automotive in the design and development of new products, the medical world has been slow to adopt. Whether we realize or not, we all just witnessed the implementation of HPC in the healthcare sphere as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. HPC is designed to handle complex problems that are beyond the means of typical data center processing. COVID-19 was, unfortunately, a perfect test case. The stakes–actual human lives on the line–couldn’t have been higher. HPC was used in a simulation capacity–to speed up testing and development while maintaining safety and efficacy. Never before has a vaccine been developed, tested, and rolled out so quickly. Proof that biology and chemistry CAN be accelerated with improved compute power.
Almost five years on, a similar pandemic problem popping up today might look very different. Even in the past four years, significant gains and innovations have been made in HPC solutions in healthcare. We have powerful tools at our disposal and medical organizations today are beginning to appreciate the increased capabilities the tech can provide.
High Performance Computing Solutions (HPC), powered up with the recent explosion of Generative AI, stands ready to blow the doors wide open on innovation in medical applications by streamlining, increasing efficiency, and decreasing turnaround times. Genome sequencing, personalized medicine, real-time imaging diagnostics are just a few of the processes that can be transformed by HPC and AI. Delivering high quality, cutting-edge, personalized healthcare requires high performance tools. The essential promise of HPC is the ability to work with huge amounts of data with speed and in real time.
Here are six top use cases in the healthcare industry for which an HPC platform would be transformative and, perhaps even life-changing.
HPC Solutions in Drug Discovery
With HPC it’s all about quantity. When the numbers get beyond what we humans–and even standard servers–can handle, it’s time to call in the power. Drug research and development, a process that may be the biological equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack (or a molecule that matches with a protein), gets unwieldy real fast. How to sift through millions or billions of molecular combinations? Run an AI model on HPC architecture.
High-Resolution Diagnostics
The better our graphics, the bigger our files, the more power we need to process and churn through them. HPC solutions can streamline the high-res processing needs of hospital imaging labs. On the diagnostic side, AI tools can boost both efficiency and efficacy by minimizing human error in interpretation.
Genome Sequencing
When the word ‘millions’ creeps into a conversation about data, it’s time for HPC-powered AI. Only these compute solutions can handle the massive data set that is the human genome (millions of possible genetic variations). Multiply that by the rising popularity and availability of genetic testing and the question becomes, “do you have the computing power you need?” High performance compute solutions also streamlines the process for specialists and the humans behind the work, by powering AI that can identify and flag patterns, trends, and variations.
Personalized Medicine with HPC Solutions
With HPC and AI capacities to run simulations and determine projected healthcare outcomes, creating ultra-specific, targeted treatment plans for each patient becomes a reality. This ability to synthesize and analyze large amounts of patient data–from cancer growth projections to historical drug effectiveness–is already being used to minimize the guesswork when customizing treatments.
Modernized Care
Today’s healthcare landscape involves A LOT of data; millions of patient records, clinical audio recordings, high-res diagnostic imaging, and more. HPC solutions can apply tools such as optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) on a massive, cloud-wide scale to organize unstructured data.
Risk Reduction in Clinical Trials
With high outlays of capital, labor, facilities, and equipment needed for clinical trials, the stakes are high. Scientists can use HPC and AI to help applications develop more extensive, specific, and accurate simulations to ensure success before you get to the clinical trial phase.
Why do you need an HPC Solution?
If your health organization is doing any kind of data analysis or processing (interpreting imagery or labwork diagnostics, to name two examples), at some point, you will arrive at a tipping point. There will be a need to expand the range, integrate new data, or increase the resolution. The need will outpace your current computing capacity. These complex, high-needs situations are exactly what HPC is designed to solve. Plus, with solutions like HPE Greenlake as a platform, for example, you get all the benefits of a best of breed solution including mega speed and capacity, flexibility and scalability (with a pay-per-use model), and locked-down edge to cloud security.
From today’s next generation medical devices and remote patient monitoring to the growth of personalize medicine, our healthcare data centers can and should be able to do more with all this data. The reality is that the healthcare industry produces a TON of data. Most of it is never analyzed or used, a potential loss in medical discoveries and innovation.
Today, if you don’t have the infrastructure built out, AI is still a pipe dream for you. Perhaps you find yourself thinking “I want to do cool things with AI but I don’t have the tools to do it and sending my data out is not an option.”
Start by asking key questions like
- What kind of healthcare does your organization aim to deliver?
- What advances do I want to utilize?
- Do I currently have the compute to do that?
If words like innovation, cutting-edge, and next-generation match the kind of healthcare your organization is seeking to deliver and your answer to that last question is “no,” an HPC platform may be the next logical step. Comport can help you navigate the HPC solutions to provide one that gives your organization cost-savings, efficiency, and best of breed processing. We can even provide a managed HPC solution if you would rather focus on other solutions. Here at Comport, we’re ready to take your hand and your healthcare (and your data) to the next level. Contact Comport for Help
