Global Medical Imaging Collaboration Initiative Announced

IBM has announced a major global initiative called the Watson Health medical imaging collaborative.

The initiative will include sixteen of the largest health systems, ambulatory radiology providers, imaging technology companies, and academic medical centers.

The IBM Watson Health (Armonk, NY, USA) collaborative is intended to address cognitive imaging for cancer care, diabetes, heart and brain diseases such as stroke, and eye health. Founding members of collaborative include Agfa HealthCare (Mortsel, Belgium), Hologic (Bedford, MA, USA), and Merge Healthcare (Chicago, IL, USA).

The collaborative intends to find new insights in existing unstructured imaging data by combining it with a wide variety of other data sources. The aim of the collaborative is improve personalized health care and to build a large body of knowledge for the benefit of all patients. Data to be analyzed includes Electronic Health Records (EHR), laboratory results, pathology and radiology reports, medical journals, published outcome studies, and guidelines for clinical care.

The collaborate plans to gather data and find ways to find financial inefficiencies, and improve workflows for clinicians, improve patient care, and reduce costs. The collaborative will also try to find ways to integrate Watson Health into the existing healthcare Information Technology (IT) systems such as the EHR, and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS).

Anne Le Grand, VP Imaging for Watson Health, said, "With the ability to draw insights from massive volumes of integrated structured and unstructured data sources, cognitive computing could transform how clinicians diagnose, treat and monitor patients. 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."

Related Links:
IBM Watson Health
Agfa HealthCare
Hologic
Merge Healthcare