MONAI -Medical Open Network for AI
By: Susant Achary
Tags: Life Sciences, Open Source, Deep Learning, Medical Imaging, Pytorch

The MONAI framework is the open-source foundation being created by Project MONAI. MONAI is a freely available, community-supported, PyTorch-based framework for deep learning in healthcare imaging. It provides domain-optimized foundational capabilities for developing healthcare imaging training workflows in a native PyTorch paradigm.

As the Pandemic crossed across seas , nations and was spreading at its speed. MONAI opensource framework came as ray of hope for AI practitioners , tool primarily focuses on Healthcare, Medical Image data. Launched in the Month of April 2020 right in middle of COVID-19 , now its is widely accepted by healthcare Institutions, its ability to data handling, high-performance training workflows and reproducible reference implementation of SOTA(state-of-the-art) algorithms.

Nvidia’s own healthcare application framework ‘Clara’ which is powered for AI-powered imaging, genomics and for development and deployment of smart sensors has collaborated with MONAI and is ready for production with upcoming release of Nvidia Clara .

“MONAI is becoming the PyTorch of healthcare, paving the way for closer collaboration between data scientists and clinicians,” said Dr. Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer, director of the QTIM lab at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH. “Global adoption of MONAI is fostering collaboration across the globe facilitated by federated learning.”

M ONAI Features:

flexible pre-processing for multi-dimensional medical imaging data;

compositional & portable APIs for ease of integration in existing workflows;

domain-specific implementations for networks, losses, evaluation metrics and more;

customizable design for varying user expertise;

multi-GPU data parallelism support.

Just a Anecdote of how large is Healthcare &Life Sciences domain :

As a discipline and in its widest sense,Medical imaging along with biological imaging incorporates radiology, which uses the imaging technologies of X-ray radiography, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, endoscopy, elastography, tactile imaging, thermography, medical photography, nuclear medicine functional imaging techniques as positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).

Architecture

End-to-End workflow of MONAI in the Healthcare & Life Sciences area

Now that we learnt something about MONAI , its features, glimpse of architecture and FYI it also has a competitor in DeepMind’s AI system AlphaFold , which has producing some remarkable result like “a solution to the 50-year-old grand challenge of determining the protein structure, also referred to as ‘protein folding problem”.

schematic of the architecture(AlphaFold)

So, looking at the sheer pace at which the research and development is happening and we all are audience to discovery of vaccine by many biotechnology companies like Moderna, Oxford–AstraZeneca ,Bharat Biotech etc . Medical field is already adopting & embracing the technology in its fullest and we will definitely see some remarkable work in future years.

Keep learning , stay curious !!!