Watson Health and Merge Healthcare, both IBM companies, have unveiled new imaging solutions using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting in Chicago.
The solutions are designed to help healthcare providers pursue personalised approaches to patient diagnosis, treatment and monitoring.
During the annual meeting, Watson Health showcased a number of new advancements including a cognitive peer review tool aimed at reconciling differences between a patient’s clinical evidence and data in his or her electronic health record (EHR); a data summarisation tool meant to give radiologists, cardiologists and others patient-specific clinical information when they’re interpreting imaging studies and a decision support tool to enable physicians to integrate imaging data with other clinical information.
In addition, Watson Health also demonstrated the MedyMatch “Brain Bleed” App, a cognitive image review tool intended to help emergency room physicians diagnose a stroke or brain bleed in a trauma patient by identifying relevant evidence in a patient record.
Merge, meanwhile, unveiled Marktation, a new process for interpreting images to help physicians improve reading speed and accuracy, with an initial application in mammography; Watson Clinical Integration Module, a cloud app for radiologists that aims to counteract common errors in medical imaging, such as base rate neglect, anchoring, bias, framing bias, and premature closure; Lesion Segmentation and Tracking Module, which Merge says can help radiologists faster interpret and report comparison exams in cancer patients and others whose conditions require longitudinal tracking.
“Watson cognitive computing is ideally suited to support radiologists on their journey ‘beyond imaging’ to practices that address the needs of patient populations, deliver improved patient outcomes and demonstrate real-world value,” said General Manager of Merge Healthcare, Nancy Koenig.
IBM Research also partnered with RSNA to debut a live demonstration of how Watson understands, reasons and learns from imaging information, which researchers say now accounts for some 90% of all medical data.
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