IBM Watson: Milestones in Healthcare DeepQA

Why Healthcare?

Few areas have advanced as rapidly as healthcare with such a vast array of information available, making it extremely difficult for a physician to master all of the research literature available and continuously being generated by new research. Medical literature doubles in size every few years. Each day the task of incorporating hundreds of thousands of articles into practice and applying them to patient care is difficult.

To that end, IBM Watson offers a vast potential to transform knowledge discovery, which when applied to healthcare can provide a new level of information support for physicians and clinical researchers. This type of new technology for clinicians can empower and assist them, by assimilating the vast amount of information that is available, and augmenting their diagnostic evaluation and research. IBM Watson points to a new paradigm emerging in health analytics - advanced analytic systems helping physicians to understand the enormous amount of data being created from an increasingly instrumented healthcare world.

IBM Watson technology is able to sift through an equivalent of about 1 million books or roughly 200 million pages of data, analyze this information and provide responses in less than 3 seconds. This extraordinary capability is expected to enable physicians to more easily coordinate medical data programmed into IBM Watson with patient factors, to help identify the most likely diagnosis and treatment options in complex cases.

While the exact use cases for IBM Watson are still to be determined, the possibilities are endless. Consider it in supporting clinicians on very complicated cases, finding patterns and identifying relevant options. IBM Watson derives a number of different hypotheses and then prioritizes them based on all the information available to it, including patient input and information from medical journals, text books, clinical data, etc.

The use of IBM Watson could also help physicians identify treatments that balance the interactions of various drugs and diseases and narrow among a large group of treatment choices. Ultimately, we believe that IBM Watson can help physicians to provide better care with new confidence in their decision-making.