Watson Now Will Be Help Read Medical Images

Artificial Intelligence  

IBM announced that Watson will gain the ability to “see” by bringing together Watson’s advanced image analytics and cognitive capabilities with data and images obtained from a well-established medical imaging management platform.

IBM has announced that Watson will soon have the ability to ‘see’ by bringing together Watson’s advanced image analytics and cognitive computing system with data and images obtained from a medical imaging management platform.

IBM plans to acquire Merge Healthcare Incorporated, a provider of medical image handling and processing, interoperability and clinical systems designed to advance healthcare quality and efficiency, in an effort to unlock the value of medical images to help physicians make better patient care decisions.

Merge’s technology platforms are used at more than 7500 US healthcare sites, as well as most of the world’s leading clinical research institutes and pharmaceutical firms to manage a growing body of medical images.

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According to the press release, the vision is that these organisations could use the Watson Health Cloud to surface new insights from a consolidated, patient-centric view of current and historical images, electronic health records, data from wearable devices and other related medical data, in a secure environment.

“As a proven leader in delivering healthcare solutions for over 20 years, Merge is a tremendous addition to the Watson Health platform,” says John Kelly, senior vice president, IBM Research and Solutions Portfolio.

“Healthcare will be one of IBM’s biggest growth areas over the next 10 years, which is why we are making a major investment to drive industry transformation and to facilitate a higher quality of care.

The acquisition bolsters IBM’s strategy to add rich image analytics with deep learning to the Watson Health platform – in effect, advancing Watson beyond natural language and giving it the ability to “see.”

Medical images are by far the largest and fastest-growing data source in the healthcare industry and perhaps the world – IBM researchers estimate that they account for at least 90% of all medical data today – but they also present challenges that need to be addressed:

• The volume of medical images can be overwhelming to even the most sophisticated specialists – radiologists in some hospital emergency rooms are presented with as many as 100,000 images a day1.
• Tools to help clinicians extract insights from medical images remain very limited, requiring most analysis to be done manually.
• At a time when the most powerful insights come at the intersection of diverse data sets (medical records, lab tests, genomics, etc.), medical images remain largely disconnected from mainstream health information. 

"Healthcare will be one of IBM’s biggest growth areas over the next 10 years, which is why we are making a major investment to drive industry transformation."

“Watson’s powerful cognitive and analytic capabilities, coupled with those from Merge and our other major strategic acquisitions, position IBM to partner with healthcare providers, research institutions, biomedical companies, insurers and other organisations committed to changing the very nature of health and healthcare in the 21st century.

Radiologists have to deal with as much 100,000 images a day according to Dr. Elliot Siegel, a physician who has worked with IBM on Watson since its earliest days. They have to process all of this visual information while trying to cross correlate with patient historic data, lab data and more. Faced with that amount of information, it is becoming increasingly evident that artificial intelligence is becoming a real necessity in medical imaging.

Moreover, medical imaging is increasingly becoming a cloud computing commodity, making it even more ready for cognitive computing systems to scan and produce ever-accurate diagnoses with deep learning systems.

SOURCE  Merge Healthcare

By 33rd Square

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