First he won on Jeopardy!, now he's going to try to beat leukemia. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center announced Friday that it will deploy Watson, IBM's famed cognitive computing system, to help eradicate cancer.
The two organizations will leverage Watson's computing power to help clinicians uncover insights from MD Anderson's vast patient and research databases, officials say. After a yearlong collaboration, the two will showcase a prototype of MD Anderson's Oncology Expert Advisor, powered by Watson.
That technology seeks to integrate the knowledge of MD Anderson's clinicians and researchers, and to advance the cancer center's goal of treating patients with the most effective, safe and evidence-based standard of care available, say officials. Starting with the fight against leukemia, the Oncology Expert Advisor aims to help clinicians develop and fine-tune treatment plans for patients, while helping them recognize adverse events that may occur throughout the care continuum.
"One unique aspect of the MD Anderson Oncology Expert Advisor is that it will not solely rely on established cancer care pathways to recommend appropriate treatment options," said Lynda Chin, MD, professor and chair of genomic medicine and scientific director of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science at MD Anderson, in a press statement.
"The system was built with the understanding that what we know today will not be enough for many patients," she added. "Therefore, our cancer patients will be automatically matched to appropriate clinical trials by the Oncology Expert Advisor. Based on evidence as well as experiences, our physicians can offer our patients a better chance to battle their cancers by participating in clinical trials on novel therapies."
First in Watson's sights: leukemia, which causes nearly one-third of all cancer deaths in children and adolescents younger than 15 years, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
The technology is expected to be accessible to the cancer center's network of clinicians through a computer interface and supported mobile devices, say MD Anderson officials. This provides clinicians – and in turn, patients – with immediate, worldwide access to MD Anderson's expertise and resources, and to IBM Watson's technology prowess in quickly extracting crucial insights from large volumes of complex data.
With more than 100,000 patients cared for each year, MD Anderson has amassed a huge trove of clinical oncology data, but extracting usable insights from it all has proven difficult. Watson will try to extract and make sense of crucial information that might be otherwise trapped in databases, or in the electronic medical records of other providers.
"The volume of healthcare information is increasing tremendously and probably accelerating," Josko Silobrcic, MD, associate partner at IBM Research and a professor at Harvard University School of Public Health, told Healthcare IT News in 2011. "That exceeds the training of healthcare providers, as well as their ability to keep up with it. We all know how busy clinicians are."
Watson is also expected to play a key role within APOLLO, a technology driven "adaptive learning environment" that MD Anderson is developing as part of its Moon Shots program. APOLLO enables iterative and continued learning between clinical care and research by helping streamline and standardize the longitudinal collection, ingestion and integration of patient's clinical history, lab data and research data into MD Anderson's centralized patient data warehouse.
Once aggregated, officials say, this complex data will be linked and made available for deep analyses by advanced analytics to extract novel insights that can lead to improved effectiveness of care and better patient outcomes.
"IBM Watson represents a new era of computing, in which data no longer needs to be a challenge, but rather, a catalyst to more efficiently deploy new advances into patient care," said Manoj Saxena, general manager, IBM Watson Solutions, in a press statement. "By helping researchers and physicians understand the meaning behind each other's data, we can empower researchers with evidence to advance novel discoveries, while helping enable physicians to make the best treatment choices or place patients in the right clinical trials."
[See also: Watson heads to medical school]
