The Watson system will help medics to make informed cancer treatment decisions by providing doctors with analysis, taken from a vast library of clinical data gathered from in-excess of 300 medical journals, 200 textbooks and a staggering 15 million pages of scientific literature.
IBM’s Watson is a question answering computer system. The platform utilizes artificial intelligence and it has proven capable of answering questions posed in natural language. The advanced technology came out of IBM’s DeepQA project, and was the brainchild of David Ferrucci. The initial development of Watson was to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!. Since then, the application has been used in scientific and medical fields. The first medical use was in aiding management decisions for lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City.
The initial medical success in 2013 has led to a new healthcare related venture at the Jupiter Medical Center. The usefulness of Watson is not to simply act like any other powerful computer; it is more with being able to analyze the collected information and to make recommendations. With oncology specifically, PharmPro reports that Watson will review a patient’s diagnosis against its vast database and the rank potential treatments together with recommended clinical guidelines. This is to help medics decide which therapies will be best suited to a patient.
Highlighting the usefulness, Abraham Schwarzberg, who is the chief of Oncology at Jupiter Medical Center said to Mobi Health News: “We were impressed by Watson’s analytical ability to help provide relevant treatment options for patients to allow physicians to personalise patient care in an unparalleled way.”
The medic adds: “Harnessing the power of Watson will help our oncology multidisciplinary team identify individual treatments.”
