In addition, The Wall Street Journal noted at the time that "more than a dozen IBM partners and clients have halted or shrunk Watson’s oncology-related projects."

In response at the time, Dr. John Kelly, IBM senior vice president, Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research, pushed back. He acknowledged that the company had made “a big bet” on healthcare — including Watson for Oncology, Watson for Clinical Trial Matching, and Watson for Genomics — and that although there have been some dropouts, at that time systems were in 230 hospitals and health organizations worldwide.

Progress in AI for health does continue to make progress. At the May American Society for Clinical Oncology 2019 annual meeting, IBM Watson Health unveiled 22 new scientific studies that demonstrated progress in providing clinical decision support for cancer care globally.

"Artificial intelligence technology is helping to enhance the way clinicians treat cancer today, in the real world," said Dr. Nathan Levitan, chief medical officer for Oncology and Genomics at IBM Watson Health in a statement, noting that, "AI is helping multidisciplinary tumor boards make more informed decisions based on curated scientific evidence; it is surfacing critical insights and information that is not identified manually; and it is helping to improve patient satisfaction by delivering a comprehensive view of treatment options."

But that is a far cry from replacing humans in the healthcare work flow, confirming the observations of some experts at the 2017 SIIM-NYMIIS meeting.

“I don’t think radiologists are going to be out of a job or anything close," said Dr. Eliot L. Siegel, a professor and the vice chair at the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Department of Diagnostic Radiology at that meeting, adding, "I think there’s going to be more radiologists, and I think it’s going to take us about five years to actually start figuring out how do we deliver all this.”

While everyone believes that AI will be part of the future radiology workflow, the more consensus view at present is that AI will shift the burden of big data and raw analysis to machines but will leave human physicians in place to manage the information and do more sophisticated analysis, advised Brady Anderson, the senior director of new product development for enterprise imaging at Philips, at that time.

"There are going to be a lot of algorithms to a lot of this stuff and there are going to be micro solutions that you need to put together," Dr. Keith J. Dreyer, the vice chairman of radiology and director of the Center for Clinical Data Science at Massachusetts General Hospital, said at the 2017 conference, noting, "when those come together, we don’t need to see thousands of numbers but they’re actually accurate numbers. They can go directly to the results of the EHR. But we should also have that access because we might have new data coming to us from this. So, I think people will probably look at this and will add value to the results we put back. This will probably be perceived as radiology, or could be.”

Back to HCB News

Business Affairs Homepage