Watson: the supercomputer revolution begins here
pharmafile | February 21, 2013 | News story | Medical Communications | Watson, ibm
Watson, a supercomputer developed by IBM is to make its debut helping oncologists diagnose and choose the best treatment for patients.
The supercomputer’s progress has been generating excitement for a number of years, and some believe it could revolutionise diagnosis and treatment of diseases in the not-too-distant future.
Watson is a ‘cognitive’ computer, capable of learning from experience, and able to synthesis and analyse information far beyond the abilities of humans. Crucially, Watson doesn’t require traditional data inputs, and can understand questions put to it in normal language.
It first shot to fame when it demonstrated its ‘thinking’ power by winning the US quiz show Jeopardy in 2011, beating two former winners of the game. Since then IBM have been working with health insurance firm WellPoint and cancer hospital Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, to develop this ‘artificial intelligence’ to help diagnose cancer and devise the best treatment programmes for individual patients.
The partners have chosen to focus on lung cancer for its service, due to the complexity of the disease and the vast and ever-evolving body of clinical data on the condition.
A first of-its-kind Watson-based advisor, available through the cloud, will assist medical professionals and researchers by helping to identify individualised treatment options for patients with cancer.
IBM says that studies suggest that these complexities have caused one in five healthcare patients to receive a wrong or incomplete diagnosis. Meanwhile an explosion of medical data and next generation cognitive computing systems could help.
“Watson’s capability to analyse huge volumes of data and reduce it down to critical decision points is absolutely essential to improve our ability to deliver effective therapies and disseminate them to the world,” Dr Craig Thompson, president and chief executive of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said in the statement.
IBM has been working with WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering for over a year to train Watson in the areas of oncology and ‘utilisation management’, or how to make the best healthcare decisions. Clinicians and technology experts have spent thousands of hours ‘teaching’ Watson how to process, analyse and interpret the meaning of complex clinical information using natural language processing.
“IBM’s work with WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center represents a landmark collaboration in how technology and evidence based medicine can transform the way in which healthcare is practiced,” said Manoj Saxena, IBM general manager, Watson Solutions.
“These breakthrough capabilities bring forward the first in a series of Watson-based technologies, which exemplifies the value of applying big data and analytics and cognitive computing to tackle the industries’ most pressing challenges.”
The world’s best medical student?
To date, Watson has ingested more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, two million pages of text from 42 medical journals and clinical trials in the area of oncology research. Watson has the power to sift through 1.5 million patient records representing decades of cancer treatment history, such as medical records and patient outcomes, and provide to physicians evidence based treatment options all in a matter of seconds.
In less than a year, Memorial Sloan-Kettering has immersed Watson in the complexities of cancer and the explosion of genetic research which has set the stage for changing care practices for many cancer patients, with highly specialised treatments based on their personal genetic tumour type.
Starting with 1,500 lung cancer cases, Memorial Sloan-Kettering clinicians and analysts are training Watson to extract and interpret physician notes, lab results and clinical research, while sharing its expertise and experiences in treating hundreds of thousands of patients with cancer.
“It can take years for the latest developments in oncology to reach all practice settings. The combination of transformational technologies found in Watson with our cancer analytics and decision-making process, has the potential to revolutionise the accessibility of information for the treatment of cancer in communities across the country and around the world,” said Craig Thompson, President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
“Ultimately, we expect this comprehensive, evidence-based approach will profoundly enhance cancer care by accelerating the dissemination of practice-changing research at an unprecedented pace.”
The Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and Westmed Medical Group will be the first to try out the new technology, and their oncologists will provide feedback to WellPoint, IBM and Memorial Sloan-Kettering to improve usability.
Speeding decisions to improve patient care
Watson absorbed more than 25,000 test case scenarios and 1,500 real-life cases, and gained the ability to interpret the meaning and analyse queries in the context of complex medical data and human and natural language, including doctors notes, patient records, medical annotations and clinical feedback. In addition, more than 14,700 hours of hands-on training was spent by nurses who meticulously trained Watson.
Watson continues to learn while on the job, much like a medical resident, while working with the WellPoint nurses who originally conducted its training. It started processing common, medical procedure requests by providers for members in WellPoint affiliated health plans in December, and was expanded to include five provider offices in the Midwest.
Watson will serve as a powerful tool to accelerate the review process between a patient’s physician and their health plan. The new products include the Interactive Care Insights for Oncology, powered by Watson, in collaboration with IBM, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint.
The WellPoint Interactive Care Guide and Interactive Care Reviewer, powered by Watson, designed for utilisation management in collaboration with WellPoint and IBM.
Andrew McConaghie
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