Years have gone by since groundbreaking announcements that would change the world of healthcare and the life sciences were unveiled at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, but NVIDIA has brought back the tradition with a significant announcement to start off the 2025 conference. NVIDIA will be teaming up with Mayo Clinic to massively accelerate the development of next-generation digital pathology by setting up the leading hospital with its latest AI platforms. The collaboration will advance the hospital’s digital pathology tools and infrastructure while also working to develop an entirely new frontier of precision medicine through human digital twins and physical AI.
“Our primary goal is to enable the broad-scale transformation of pathology data into meaningful insights,” Jim Rogers, CEO of Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology, told Inside Precision Medicine. “We will unlock the data currently inaccessible in the current standard of practice, which involves reading glass slides. Our collaboration with NVIDIA allows us to build and power the necessary infrastructure to make this a reality. Ultimately, we are invested in creating an ecosystem, a whole new way to deliver value to patients and caregivers. Through this initiative, Mayo Clinic will catalyze digitization and the delivery of impactful AI-driven pathology solutions to patients and caregivers.”
Next-generation digital pathology
Mayo Clinic has led in transforming pathology—a field traditionally reliant on slow and manual methods—into a faster, more precise digital process to enhance how doctors diagnose and treat complex diseases like cancer.
Mayo Clinic’s Digital Pathology platform, developed in the last few years, uses state-of-the-art imaging technology and automated robotic labs to compile an unparalleled database of medical data. This database includes 10 million patient records and 20 million high-resolution slide images. Such a comprehensive dataset is perfect for developing foundational AI models and robust, pre-trained systems to tackle various tasks across different fields. By leveraging this data, Mayo Clinic is paving the way for groundbreaking AI tools to revolutionize the speed and accuracy of disease diagnosis and treatment.
“Since the 1800s through to today, pathologists have worked with microscopes and glass slides,” said Rogers. “Even now, fewer than 10% of pathology practices in the world are digitized, preventing the necessary transformation of pathology—the practice that is the front end of much of the serious and complex care in medicine—for the benefit of our patients and clinicians. This is unacceptable. Mayo Clinic Digital Pathology is building the tools and infrastructure so that this inaccessible data can be used to create increasingly personalized and accurate diagnoses, predictions, and treatments for patients.”
Mayo Clinic plans to use NVIDIA’s new DGX B200 platform, which uses super-powerful computers with 1.4 terabytes of memory specifically designed to handle large medical image files like digital pathology slides. They will also use MONAI, NVIDIA’s free, open-source platform for developing AI tools for medical imaging. This combination will help them process and analyze complex medical images more effectively.
Rogers explained, “In the short term, we will define, build, and optimize the tools and techniques necessary for extracting and refining actionable insights from pathology slides and related data. A great example of this is our collaboration with Aignostics, which, within two months, has delivered a leading digital pathology foundation model. We will enable innovators to create the best solutions for patients and caregivers. In the longer term, we believe edge computing for AI, where partners such as NVIDIA have incredible capabilities, will be valuable to provide impactful AI at the point of care while simultaneously addressing some of the cost and complexity factors that prevent the necessary scaling and adoption of digital pathology.”
Human digital twins and physical AI
The NVIDIA-Mayo collaboration doesn’t stop at just beefing up the hospital’s leading digital pathology platform. NVIDIA and Mayo Clinic also aim to create human digital twins—a virtual representation of a person—to simulate, predict, and optimize patient health outcomes. Human digital twins can be used in clinical trials, medical training, and surgical intervention planning.
“Our ultimate goal is to create a human digital twin,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. “This dynamic digital representation includes medical imaging, pathology, health records, and wearables. To achieve this, Mayo Clinic and NVIDIA will leverage some of the latest AI and vision language models like Cosmos Nemotron and our microservices. This collaboration will be a cornerstone for new drug discovery and diagnostic medicine applications.”
If that isn’t futuristic enough, Mayo Clinic and NVIDIA will continue to expand this collaboration to advance the use of physical AI, such as robots, in healthcare and life sciences. Physical AI models are costly and require vast real-world data and testing. Mayo Clinic combines its medical knowledge and AI expertise with NVIDIA’s new platform, NVIDIA Cosmos, to create advanced computer models. These models are designed to simulate real-world environments, helping robots learn how to move around and interact with the physical world. Announced at the CES 2025 tech conference, NVIDIA Cosmos makes it easier for developers to create large amounts of realistic, physics-based data that can improve and test their AI systems.
NVIDIA’s investment in life sciences and healthcare
The news of NVIDIA’s partnership with Mayo Clinic was just one of four such announcements. The computing technology developer and manufacturer is also partnering with IQVIA, Illumina, and Arc Institute to revolutionize the healthcare and life sciences industries with AI and accelerated computing.
“Healthcare is a $10 trillion industry with over 30% of its operating expenses dedicated to meeting the growing demand,” said Powell. “To address this challenge, we need AI solutions of all kinds. No single company can achieve this alone. The incredible ecosystem and partnerships we’ve just announced here at JP Morgan will demonstrate this rapid adoption of NVIDIA AI by the world-leading companies in the industry. We’re on a mission to improve patient care and increase accessibility, and together, we will write the next chapter in medicine.”
