Steven Tolle, chief strategy officer for Watson Health Imaging, told Forbes that the members would help doctors focus on cancers including breast and lung, eye health and brain and heart disease.

“They partner with one partner and go after one disease,” Tolle said of other research and diagnostic efforts during the Forbes.com interview. “That’s not good enough. We are going to go after the entire body, starting with the diseases that cost the most and kill the most.”


Anne Le Grand, IBM’s vice president of imaging for Watson Health, said cognitive computing could transform how clinicians diagnose, treat and monitor patients by getting insights from the massive volume of integrated structured and unstructured data sources.

“Through IBM’s medical imaging collaborative, Watson may create opportunities for clinicians to extract greater insights and value from imaging data while better managing costs,” she said in prepared remarks.

The goal is also to help Watson eventually predict disease and changing conditions too. In an example cited by Fortune a woman’s annual mammogram could be examined along with her full electronic health record then cross-referenced against other similar cases in the database to see if there were warning signs of cells that could turn malignant or if the patient were to be considered high risk in the future. With that information, doctors might be able to give the patient a better outcome, according to the Fortune.com scenario.

IBM Watson Health noted that the collaborative members were also focused on preventing heart attacks, and Watson could be trained to identity congestive heart failure early and monitor a patient’s disease progression. Ophthalmologists and optometrists could use an online tool that could detect diabetic retinopathy and other eye diseases among people with pre-diabetes and diabetes, and obesity or heart disease.

IBM, with Watson Health, has been making acquisitions in recent months to bolster its medical imaging management and health care analytics platforms, including the $1 billion deal late last year to acquire Merge Healthcare and the $2.6 billion purchase in April of Truven Health Analytics, a leading provider of cloud-based health care data, analytics and insights.

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