Despite the obvious advantage in speed and the sheer number of cases Watson can diagnose in short order – and even given its already impressive performance compared with experienced oncologists, Somashekhar stressed that the system was an adjunct, not a replacement, for doctors.

“There is always an important distinction between what can be done and what should be done based on a variety of very personal factors for the patient,” he said. “We are dealing with human beings, and the context and preferences of each individual patient, the patient-physician relationship, and human touch and empathy are very important. It’s always going to be the decision of the treating oncologist and patient to determine what is truly the best option for the patient,” he concluded.

Its real-world impact, he advised to HealthDay, is that in just a couple of minutes “it will show all of the options, and it will share the evidence," he noted, adding that this means that “then you're in a better place to make a right judgment, especially when you have too many choices and too many variables."

Chief of surgical oncology for Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, Dr. Stephanie Bernik, concurred.

"It's probably very good for physicians who aren't working in a group," she told HealthDay. "It's almost like getting a second opinion."

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and IBM joined forces to create WFO, which scours electronic health records with its natural language-capable AI system to come up with diagnoses and treatment options for lung, colorectal and breast cancers.

The company had launched its partnership deal with over 15 health care groups in June, according to Marketwatch.

“There is strong potential for systems like Watson to help to make radiologists more productive, diagnoses more accurate, decisions more sound and costs more manageable,” Nadim Michel Daher, a medical imaging and informatics analyst at Frost & Sullivan told Marketwatch in June.

Somashekhar has used Watson to treat breast cancer in the field before. In early August, a 37-year-old Indian programmer with a rare type of fast-spreading breast cancer was “seen” by Watson in Bengaluru, India.

“At the click of a button 15 million pages are scanned,” he recounted. “Besides my team, there is one more unbiased person (Watson) whose thinking capacity is infinite,” he said.

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