Due to the rising incidence of cancer in China, 21 hospitals across the country plan to adopt IBM’s Watson for Oncology. This is the initial introduction of a multi-year partnership in which Watson for Oncology will be introduced to hospitals across the nation.

"Health care in China is transforming at a rapid pace but the world's most populous country faces numerous challenges as it struggles to cope with a precipitous rise in cancer and other diseases," Nancy Fabozzi, principal analyst of transformational health at Frost & Sullivan, said in a statement. "Optimum care for cancer patients often requires a customized, evidence-based approach to treatment due to the unique characteristics of the disease.”

It’s predicted that there will be about 4,292,000 newly diagnosed invasive cancer cases in 2015 in China, which corresponds to an average of almost 12,000 diagnoses each day, according to a new report published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.
The operation service provider, Hangzhou CognitiveCare, was established in January 2016 to help bring cognitive computing to China to fight cancer. Watson for Oncology is only available in English, but CognitiveCare will offer some translation support so that information like drug labels and treatment guidelines will be available in Chinese dialects.

Physicians are challenged with staying up-to-date on the high volume of new and emerging oncology research. Watson scores and ranks medical literature, and quickly summarizes patient records to give oncologists recommendations about different drug options and administration instructions.

It sifts through a massive amount of information including over 300 medical journals, more than 200 textbooks and almost 15 million pages of text, as well as peer-reviewed studies and clinical guidelines. Since it has machine-learning capabilities, it continues to learn over time.

Watson for Oncology was developed by IBM in collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which trained the computing platform. IBM also has a partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center.

In the U.S., IBM and the American Cancer Society (ACS) are working together to create the first virtual cancer health advisor using Watson. It will use 14,000 pages of information from ACS’s website on 70 cancer topics, healthy lifestyles, risk reduction and early detection.

“Our hope is to put the advisor in the hands of all who would benefit from it. We want to have the greatest impact for the greatest number of people,” Rich Wender, chief cancer control officer for the ACS, told HCB News.

Back to HCB News

Rad Oncology Homepage