Sonrai Analytics awarded AI infrastructure to improve patient outcomes with Colorectal Cancer

The platform has been developed with the support of Dell Technologies, NVIDIA, Cancer Research UK and Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.

Powered by Dell Technologies latest PowerEdge servers and NVIDIA GPUs, the purpose-built AI solution will empower Sonrai Analytics to train a huge volume of AI models.

This is also enabled by efficient Power and Cooling provided by APC Schneider and AIOps service partner Securelinx.

The infrastructure will allow for more complex algorithms and architectures to analyse data faster, speed-up discovery and unlock important insights that could lead to healthcare breakthroughs within the innovative test environment.

Sonrai Analytics, established in 2018 by Dr Darragh McArt and Deva Senevirathne, uses AI and deep learning to enable Contract Research Organisations (CROs), Biotech and Pharma to unlock critical information contained within Big Data.

Dr Darragh McArt, CEO of Sonrai Analytics, said: “The relationships developed with NVIDIA and Dell in the technology sphere are important to help promote and foster innovation, allowing Sonrai to really add value towards our discovery of patterns within disease.

“This cutting-edge hardware will help advance our Data Science and Deep Learning operations to the next level. It enables our team to apply AI on bigger datasets using state-of-the-art algorithms whilst also reaching optimal solutions faster.”

At present, large AI experiments can take days to complete. Datasets of hundreds of patients routinely contain terabytes of molecular and imaging data. As the size and complexity of the data sets continue to scale, so too will the analytical challenges that they pose.

Commenting on the launch of the platform, George Maybury, Public Sector Director at Dell Technologies Ireland and Northern Ireland, continued: “Performance, availability and scalability are key for innovative companies like Sonrai Analytics that are harnessing the power of AI to improve patient outcomes.

“With the latest next generation Dell EMC PowerEdge, the team at Sonrai Analytics will be able to analyse vast quantities of data at speed and accelerate the development of precision medicine.”

Craig Rhodes, EMEA Industry Lead, AI for Health and Life Sciences at NVIDIA, explained: “Data science workflows have traditionally been slow and cumbersom. Dell selected NVIDIA RTX GPUs to enable superior performance for end-to-end data science workflows in the healthcare field, where speed, efficiency and accuracy significantly impact patient outcomes.”

Dr David Crosby, Head of Prevention and Early Detection Research for Cancer Research UK, added: “This application of artificial intelligence to data from tissue-based and genomics-based approaches has the potential to identify which colorectal cancers may be at risk of recurrence and could aid in earlier detection of ‘born to be bad’ tumour types which may require additional treatment.”

The infrastructure has capacity to support many AI applications and one potential use is within a £7 million partnership with the world’s leading Biotech company Roche and the Northern Ireland Precision Medicine Centre through the ACTIONED programme, funded jointly by Innovate UK and Cancer Research UK.

The AI infrastructure has capacity to support our development of deep learning algorithms that could help transform the treatment of patients with colorectal cancer.

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