IBM’s Watson Will Make Decisions About Cancer Care in 14 Hospitals in the U.S. and Canada
May 7th, 2015Via: BBC:
IBM’s supercomputer Watson will be used to make decisions about cancer care in 14 hospitals in the US and Canada, it has been announced.
Using computers to trawl through vast amounts of medical data speeds up the diagnosis process.
The system will help assess individual tumours and suggest which drug should be used to target them.
Doctors have welcomed the new computer which will learn from each case it examines.
“When you are dealing with cancer, it is always a race,” said Dr Lukas Wartman, assistant director of cancer genomics at the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, one of those signed up to use the Watson system.
“As a cancer patient myself, I know how important genomic information can be.
“Unfortunately, translating cancer-sequencing results into potential treatment options often takes weeks with a team of experts to study just one patient’s tumour and provide results to guide treatment decisions. Watson appears to help dramatically reduce that timeline,” he explained.
