IBM Watson helps Chinese oncologists treat their patients

The IBM Watson cognitive system has been helping physicians for a long time. One of the tasks of Watson is to help doctors all over the world to research and treat cancer. Now our company has entered into an agreement with the company Hangzhou Cognitive Care from Beijing. The essence of the contract is the implementation of the Watson for Oncology program in 21 hospitals in China.

In this country, the level of cancer of the population is quite high. Every day, 12,000 patients are diagnosed with cancer. In addition, 2.8 million people die in China every year with such a diagnosis . IBM Watson will now study the problem. “The number of oncological diseases continues to increase. Now, cancer is killing more people in China than any other disease, ”says a spokesman for the IBM Watson team. "We are going to share knowledge with Chinese doctors."

21 hospitals in China will use IBM Watson resources to develop individualized treatment for each patient. Individual approach always gives the best results. But in ordinary hospitals, doctors simply do not have time to search for an individual method of treating patients, therefore, methods generally accepted in medical practice are used. IBM Watson, after analyzing the genetic material of patients, can quickly find a course for any person. For this purpose, a database containing about 15 million medical text pages is used.
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“Hangzhou Cognitive Care is ready to offer the IBM Watson for oncology service to every oncologist in China,” said Zhen Tu, the company's executive director.

Now a number of medical centers and hospitals are taking part in the Watson for Oncology project. This, for example, the International Hospital Bumrungrad (Thailand), the New York Center for Human Genome Research and other organizations.

The active block of the IBM Watson system no longer occupies the whole room, the block size is now about three pizza boxes stacked on top of each other. Watson asks questions and makes assumptions using data from recent medical research in the field of oncology, plus information from the patient's medical record and current symptoms are used. As a result, each patient receives an individual approach - after all, the same disease, even the simplest and innocuous, occurs in different people in different ways. What to say about such a complex problem as cancer.



IBM Watson can structure huge amounts of data in seconds, while studying the results of research on a specific topic over the past couple of years. In this case, Watson is studying the latest data on a particular disease or group of diseases. An ordinary doctor simply can not study all the necessary information. At best, we are talking about several thematic articles on the results of research.

IBM Watson offers each patient a personalized course of treatment that focuses on the factors that led to the development of a cancer in a particular person, taking into account his genome. This allows you to increase the chances of a successful recovery, and each new case further increases this probability. Experts believe that in the near future, cognitive systems will help humanity to more effectively deal with various diseases (not only cancerous).