CHICAGO, May 31, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM Watson Health
and its partners today unveiled 22 new scientific studies that
demonstrate progress in providing clinical decision support for
cancer care globally at the American Society for Clinical Oncology
2019 annual meeting.
"Artificial intelligence technology is helping to enhance the
way clinicians treat cancer today, in the real world," said
Nathan Levitan, MD, MBA, Chief
Medical Officer for Oncology and Genomics at IBM Watson Health. "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."
Watson Health's studies show how Watson AI provides value in
supporting evidence-informed treatment decisions, improving patient
confidence in treatment plans, and annotating genomic variants and
identifying clinical interventions. In total, more than 70
peer-reviewed studies, posters and abstracts support Watson Health
offerings in oncology and genomics.
"In this early era of AI use in healthcare decision-making, the
studies presented at ASCO this year offer compelling evidence of
the important role this technology will play in helping oncologists
improve cancer treatment for each individual patient," Levitan
continued.
Following are among the key study findings being presented at
ASCO:
- Watson for Oncology Informs
Clinical Decision Changes in 13.6% of Cases Reviewed by
Multidisciplinary Tumor Board: In a blinded evaluation of 1000
breast, lung and colorectal cancer patients in India, the multidisciplinary tumor board at
Manipal Hospitals changed their treatment decisions in 13.6% of
cases based on information provided by Watson for Oncology. Investigators reported
that in these cases, decisions changed because Watson provided recent evidence for a newer
treatment (55%), a more personalized alternative (30%), or new
insights from genotypic and phenotypic data and evolving clinical
experiences (15%). [Abstract link]
"Building on previous studies, this evidence suggests that AI
decision support holds substantial promise to reduce the cognitive
burden on oncologists, which is a significant problem impacting
physician burnout today," said lead investigator SP Somashekhar,
Chairman of Surgical Oncology, Manipal Hospitals. "We consider
Watson for Oncology to be an
important tool to support decision making, and this study suggests
that AI could help reduce variability of care."
- Watson for Genomics
Surfaces New Insights for Oncologists Treating Patients with
Hematological Malignancies: In a study of 54 patients with
hematological malignancies at Hallym University College of
Medicine, Watson for Genomics
annotations of sequencing results correlated well with manually
curated expert opinion (90% in randomized subset), and identified
clinically actionable insights that were not identified by manual
interpretation in 33% of cases. This helps suggest that the
labor-intensive manual curation of such results could be augmented
with tools like Watson for
Genomics. [Abstract link]
- Watson for Oncology
Improves Cancer Patient Confidence: Physicians from the
Oncology Department at Beijing Chaoyang Integrative Medicine
Emergency Medical Center report that incorporating Watson for Oncology into a 7-step patient
engagement and consultation process helped patients to better
understand their disease and treatment options. This resulted in
stronger patient confidence in their care plans. [Abstract
link]
IBM Watson Health Continues to Enhance Products
IBM Watson Health continuously seeks to enhance capabilities in
its offerings to help physicians improve the efficacy and
efficiency of cancer treatment. During ASCO, IBM Watson Health
reported data on a new method to automatically identify clinically
relevant, high-quality scientific publications by training machine
learning on the text from abstracts of papers cited in three expert
resources: NCCN, NCI-PDQ, and Hemonc.org. The model classified
papers in the test set with 93% accuracy, 95% sensitivity, and 91%
specificity, which suggests that machine learning can be used to
automatically identify relevant clinical publications and may
reduce the time clinicians spend finding pertinent evidence for
their patients.
Additionally, IBM Watson Health is strategically focused on
tailoring offerings to support the workflow experience of
oncologists in key markets based on feedback from physicians and
insight from scientific data. Watson Health oncology and genomics
offerings are currently being used to support physicians and
patients in their cancer care journeys in more than 15 markets
around the world.
"With 18 million diagnoses globally each year, cancer is a
devastating disease that has a heavy human toll, as well as a high
health system cost," said Dr. Levitan. "Patients often face
grueling and confusing treatment regimens, while oncologists sift
through reams of medical literature and genomic data to identify
the best care plan for each individual patient. All the while,
researchers are hamstrung by trials that too often fail due to low
patient recruitment. IBM Watson Health was created to help address
pressing health challenges through data, analytics and AI, and this
is our focus in oncology."
About IBM Watson Health:
Watson Health is a business
unit of IBM that is dedicated to the development and implementation
of cognitive and data-driven technologies to advance health. Watson
Health technologies are tackling a wide range of the world's
biggest health care challenges, including cancer, diabetes, drug
development and more. Learn more.
Contact:
Christine
Douglass
cgdouglass@us.ibm.com
415-535-4479
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SOURCE IBM Watson Health