Watson's cognitive system will help doctors make an accurate diagnosis of patients with heart disease.

For several years now, the IBM Watson cognitive system has been working in such a complex area as oncology, where it helps to make an accurate diagnosis and find an effective way to cure each patient.

Now IBM developers have decided to expand the capabilities of Watson, offering assistance to the system and cardiologists. As planned by the authors of the project, the cognitive cloud platform within the framework of this project will analyze a huge amount of medical data related to a particular patient. These data include images with ultrasound, x-rays and all other graphical information that allows you to specify the diagnosis of a person.

At the very beginning, Watson's capabilities will be used to look for signs of stenosis of the aortic heart valve. In stenosis, the opening of the aorta narrows due to the splicing of the valves of its valve, which prevents normal blood flow from the left ventricle to the aorta. The problem is that it is not so easy to detect valve stenosis, despite the fact that it is a very common heart disease in adults (70-85% of cases among all defects).
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Watson will try to determine what he "sees" on medical images: stenosis, tumor, infection, or just an anatomical anomaly. The system will work at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

“If you have an ultrasound image of the heart, the quality may not be very good, and the diagnosis and treatment depends on the level of training of specialists who analyze the image,” says Ann Lee Grand, one of the leaders of Watson Health. “What we want to do is look carefully at the history of the disease. We want to help doctors examine the history of the disease more closely. "

As in other cases, the Watson system will examine a large number of different sources of information, including cardiology records, medical history and other data sources. This technology has already been tested at the development stage, but on a small scale.



In addition, with access to patient records, Watson will look for other patients with symptoms similar to the symptoms of patients with diagnosed heart problems. This will help detect other people with a similar problem, even if Watson did not study their images, neither ultrasound nor X-ray.

In addition to heart problems, Watson is able to medical diagnosis using additional information to clarify the diagnosis of oncology patients, diagnose patients with lung diseases or problems with the brain. In the near future, the developers plan to further expand the capabilities of Watson, directing his abilities to diagnose deep vein thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, heart attacks of various kinds.

Initially, the technology will be tested in the United States. American physicians will be able to use the services of the cognitive system this year in a few months. In general, IBM Watson is able to help doctors by taking off part of their routine image analysis responsibilities, helping them to process and analyze such information. The ability to use additional data with the information obtained during the analysis of images helps to make an accurate diagnosis with a minimum probability of error.

It is worth noting that the cognitive system has long been used to fight cancer. For example, IBM Watson helps doctors through the Watson for Oncology program. At the same time, the active unit of the system no longer occupies the whole room, but is approximately equal to three pizza boxes placed 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.