How IBM Watson can change healthcare in the near future

IBM Watson is a cognitive system that helps conduct business, make weather forecasts, come up with original recipes for dishes, heal people. In fact, the service is used in much more spheres than indicated, but in this material we would like to touch on medicine.

So, Watson is gradually becoming an indispensable assistant to doctors and patients. But all this is no match for what Watson can do in the health sector in the near future. What exactly? Let's try to imagine, and not just fantasize - everything that is said in the sequel is quite realistic, and probably will not be realized in the not too distant future.

IBM Watson can be a smart assistant to a patient who visits the hospital. And it will not be a bot, which banks and other organizations sometimes use to create a digital “first line of communication” with customers. Thanks to the IBM services that help the computer recognize and process voice requests, the system “understands” what it says and can respond to the questions of the patients without any problems. These questions may be: "Who is working at the reception in surgery," "Is there free parking near the hospital," "Tell me more about such a disease."
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Watson is already working as a digital concierge at Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool. Soon, doctors want to teach the system to advise children on their diagnosis and upcoming procedures.

Providing detailed and relevant information about the patient to the attending physician. One of the key points in healthcare is the availability of a wealth of information about diseases and medical experiments. A person is simply unable to orient himself in all this information space, no matter how highly qualified a specialist he is.

But for a powerful computer system like IBM Watson, analyzing vast amounts of information is not a problem. “If you are looking for information about the disease, you need to pretty much study the Internet to get a real picture of the disease,” says one of the participants in the IBM Watson project.

A person or a regular computer system for analyzing data may simply do not have enough time, but IBM Watson can help. The cognitive system will not only provide links to sources of necessary information, but also highlight the most important points so that the doctor does not waste time. In addition to publications, Watson is able to analyze data of other types. For example, process decoding data of the human genome to search for an individual method of treatment.

Better treatment. This item is a logical consequence of the previous one. As an example, Watson for Oncology , which helps to find individualized treatment for cancer patients.

Usually the oncology patient must meet with their doctor. He scrolls through the history of the disease in print or electronic form. It is clear that not always the doctor has enough time to study the patient's medical “biography”. That is why the prescribed method of treatment can be unsatisfactory and fragmented.

IBM Watson takes all these unstructured records and analyzes them, structuring them in a convenient form for doctors and patients. In a clear case history, you can immediately understand which way of getting rid of the disease is worth advising the patient. The most interesting thing is that IBM Watson will also show inappropriate treatment methods (history, place of residence, etc.).



Creating effective drugs. IBM Watson can help create new drugs by speeding up the development process. For example, the usual way to create a new medicine from scratch takes developers about 12 years. IBM Watson is able to increase the chances of getting an effective medicine while reducing the time of its introduction into circulation. Work on the creation of new drugs is already underway.

In particular, specialists from IBM Research have developed a macromolecule, an organic compound that allows you to fight against viruses that are resistant to traditional antiviral drugs. The molecule was developed by a joint team of IBM Research and the Singapore Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology ( IBN ).

The new macromolecule contains three components that are able to suppress viruses. One component uses electrostatic coupling to block the source of viruses. In this case, the virus simply cannot infect healthy cells. The second tool helps to change the pH inside infected cells, which makes it harder for viruses to reproduce. And finally, the molecule contains mannose, an isomer of glucose, which enters the healthy cells of the immune system and provides a more effective fight against viruses, directing them to fight infection.

At the same time, Watson helps reduce the drug resistance of cancer cells.

Quality service and treatment at home. Patients, including "heavy", after a successful recovery are sent home. But here the doctor is more difficult to monitor the state of human health. Therefore, the logical solution would be to closely monitor people who have recovered from a serious illness, and IBM Watson can monitor the drug treatment of the patient.

During the entire course of treatment, IBM Watson monitors the results and recommends a new treatment if problems arise. The aid of the cognitive system in monitoring the patient’s body is provided by modern smart devices. For example, fitness trackers, heart rate monitors, smart scales, etc.

In case of detection of any problems, the system will collect all the necessary data and send them to the doctor, who will already make a decision on a specific problem.

Now IBM Watson is gradually creating more and more new drugs, as well as monitoring the suitability of old ones. The cognitive system is becoming smarter, which means that the time is not far off when home electronic systems can not only monitor the health of their wards, but also provide them with optimal treatment if necessary (with an individual approach). All this should reduce the percentage of misdiagnosis, increase the effectiveness of treatment and increase the chances of recovery even for seriously ill patients.