University of Hawai’i Cancer Center Opts for WD Ultrastar Data60 Hybrid Storage Platform

Western Digital Corp. partnered with the University of Hawai’i Cancer Center to provide the storage foundation needed to scale and store critical research data focused on improving the accuracy of cancer detection from mammography scans.

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The center’s AI Precision Health Institute (AI-PHI) has deployed Western Digital’s Ultrastar Data60 Hybrid Storage Platform filled with 720TB of Ultrastar HDDs. The organization is leveraging this data to run AI, ML and deep learning to assess human health and predict the risk of disease to help relieve the increasing prevalence of cancer in the Pacific region.

“AI has changed everything in terms of how we addressed problems with big data,” said John Shepherd, Ph.D., founder, University of Hawai’i Cancer Center’s AI-PHI. “When you’re going to examine six million images, it takes a lot of time. With fast and reliable access to large amounts of data and the power of AI, you can say ‘Okay, there’s an outcome difference between these two images, which may ultimately help us pick out the women that may develop cancer vs. those that don’t.’ We are grateful for our partnership with Western Digital, who helps make this all possible with its highly reliable and scalable storage solutions.“

AI-PHI’s mammogram database holds the Hawai’i Pacific Island Mammography Registry, which is focused on women in Hawai’i, including native Hawaiian women who statistically fare worse with breast cancer compared to nearly every other ethnic group. With improved performance, ample capacity, and hundreds of terabytes of fast storage provided by WD, researchers have a constant, quick flow of access to large amounts of data needed for AI workflows. This helps them as they work to develop, curate and share the massive and diverse medical datasets for cancer research to solve this problem for women in Hawai’i, and other women around the world.

“Because of the uniqueness of Hawai’i, we have this really broad demographic of ethnicities, races, BMIs, and cultures, that if you train an AI model with that broad amount of data, it should deliver models that are useful anywhere in the world,” continued Shepherd.

“The work Dr. Shepherd is spearheading at the University of Hawai’i Cancer Center’s AI Precision Health Institute is a powerful example of how data is being used to drive insights that lead to breakthrough discoveries, enabling the world to solve its biggest challenges,” said Kurt Chan, VP and GM, data center platforms, WD. “We are thrilled to contribute the storage foundation that provides fast and easy access to the data that helps enable these researchers to glean insights and understanding, and ultimately help save lives.“

In an ongoing collaboration to support this important cause, the center plans to extend its storage foundation in partnership with WD with the addition of an OpenFlex open composable infrastructure solution, and Ultrastar NVMe SSDs. More efficient workflows and flexible collaboration provided by the new solutions will aid AI-PHI in its latest research focused on validating new AI cancer risk and detection models and developing advanced health analysis AI models through non-invasive methods. These include 3D full body-scans, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scans for body composition, blood tests for metabolic markers, and strength assessments.