HARDWARE PLATFORMS

AI-powered medical devices can make a crucial difference in all phases of care: from diagnostic tools to AI-enhanced digital operating rooms, and postoperative AI analytics that augment patient recovery.

It’s a time of unprecedented opportunity for medical equipment manufacturers. But to capitalize on that opportunity, they need to find innovative ways to shorten development timelines, overcome hardware integration challenges, and meet the medical industry’s stringent certification standards.

To this end, manufacturers are turning to industrial PCs (IPCs) purpose-built for medical AI use cases that can reduce risk and uncertainty.

“In an industry with long product life cycles, medical device makers are understandably wary of attempting to incorporate complex AI technology into their solutions,” says Emily Teng, Associate Director of Product Management at Advantech, a leading IoT intelligent systems and embedded platforms provider. “Building on proven hardware platforms designed for medical AI helps to simplify the process and speed time to market.”

To accommodate a broad range of use cases, Advantech medical platforms are designed for both compliance and customization. This puts equipment manufacturers in a “best of both worlds” situation, because they have access to computing platforms that can be used off-the-shelf, through OEM/ODM, and joint development models.

Development Models for AI Medical Devices

Advantech’s work with two medical solutions providers highlights the benefits of IPCs for device manufacturers—and shows how they can support differing product development models as needed.

In one case, an OR solutions integrator was attempting to develop a new video solution using an ODM approach. But it was concerned about potential liability that a custom hardware design would bring, and struggled with the engineering challenges involved.

To solve these problems, the manufacturer decided to use the Advantech USM-500 computer as the basis for its new solution. Because the USM-500 is designed to meet compliance requirements such as the IEC 60601-1, which specifies electrical safety standards for medical equipment, as well as electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) standards to prevent interference with other devices. This meant that the company didn’t have to go through the time-consuming and costly hardware certification process or take on additional liability. The result was a significantly accelerated rollout: from RFQ to mass production in just six months.

“Manufacturers that want to avoid a lengthy certification process can use our solution ‘as is’ because everything is fully configured and certified for medical uses, from the computing system, to the video capture, and network interface controller cards,” says Matt Wieborg, Solution Architect at Advantech. “But some customers need greater customization, so we designed the IPC with extensive expansion capabilities, which provides a strong underlying foundation with enough flexibility for manufacturers to fine-tune what they need and still make it to production with relative ease.”

For example, another medical device maker planned to build a solution using a video capture card that had high power requirements, and a more interactive user interface.

Advantech’s design team worked with the company’s engineering group to create a tailored design. They built a 10-inch LCD display into the unit’s front bezel to address the UI requirement. To support the power demands of their customer’s preferred video capture card, Advantech adjusted the unit’s I/O accordingly. The result was a performant solution that leveraged the IPC’s core capabilities while providing the customization the manufacturer needed.

When #medical equipment #manufacturers build on tested #computing platforms, they can get their solutions into #clinical settings more efficiently. @Advantech_USA via @insightdottech

Ensuring Stability and Security at the Clinical Edge

When medical equipment manufacturers build on tested computing platforms, they can get their solutions into clinical settings more efficiently. And because these platforms are designed by hardware experts, there are added data security and product longevity benefits as well.

Advantech, for example, has helped its partners enhance cybersecurity and data privacy in several ways. It has introduced device makers to basic hardware industry best practices such as using trusted platform modules and built-in encryption engines to ensure better cybersecurity. By providing high-performance processing at the edge, it has also bolstered privacy by reducing the amount of patient data being sent to the cloud for processing. In addition, Advantech makes it possible to help device makers install security patches and OS updates more easily.

In terms of solution stability, Advantech’s technology partnership with Intel has been of particular benefit.

“Intel’s portfolio excels in edge AI uses cases and covers the entire range of what our medical device manufacturing needs, from low power processing all the way up through server-class computing,” says Wieborg. “In addition, having a reliable platform with longevity is especially important in this sector. We have many buyers who will only consider Intel solutions because of the stability—and the fact that they know Intel will support these products for many years to come.”

Partnerships as the Future of Medical AI

The availability of regulatory-compliant and flexible medical-grade hardware will help more and more medical equipment manufacturers incorporate AI into their offerings. In turn, this will help fuel a wider AI product ecosystem in which partnerships between medical solutions specialists and hardware providers are key.

Given the wide variety of AI implementations in healthcare settings, this is a huge help to the device builders—who need support from hardware specialists with experience building for different configurations, environmental conditions, regulatory requirements, and computing specifications.

But Advantech says that makers of medical PCs will also benefit greatly from these partnerships:

“We feel privileged to work with so many top medical device manufacturers,” says Wieborg. “The voice of the customer is really guiding our product lines; customers come to us with problems, we come up with solutions, and that’s how we’re all going to continue to succeed in the future.”

This article was edited by Georganne Benesch, Editorial Director for insight.tech.