Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center announced in a statement Friday that it has reached new technology breakthroughs in patient care with the help of IBM supercomputer, Watson.
The unveiling of the first commercially developed Watson-based cognitive computing system is an innovation that has helped the cancer center to improve the quality and efficiency of care for patients. Named after IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson, the supercomputer was specifically created to answer questions on the quiz show, Jeopardy! Watson won the first prize of $1 million for beating two of the show's former winners in 2011.
IBM partnered with both WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for over a year, training Watson with the help of clinicians and technology experts. Experts spent thousands of hours training Watson with their knowledge and expertise in oncology. The supercomputer was taught about hundreds of lung cancers and how medical information was used by experts to personalize cancer care treatment.
The idea to implement Watson came about when Mark Kris MD, Chief of Thoracic Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and his colleague, Larry Norton, Deputy Physician-in-Chief for Breast Cancer Programs decided to harness the system to improve patient care. "Combining the abilities to process massive amounts of data and use natural language processing could not only accomplish amazing things like winning Jeopardy!, it could also revolutionize care and research, accelerating progress for people with cancers," said Kris in a statement.
"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. IBM describes Watson as "an application of advanced Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Machine Learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering."
Watson has helped to provide physicians with evidence based treatments in seconds, sifting through 1.5 million records of cancer patients and decades of treatment history. To date, Watson has absorbed over 600,000 pieces of medical evidence and two million pages of research from Oncology medical journals and clinical trials.
"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 industry's most pressing challenges," said Saxena.
