Doctors in Japan were perplexed for months over the case of a woman with leukemia who did not take to any of the treatments prescribed to her--then IBM’s Watson took over and solved the mystery in minutes.
The artificial intelligence system was able to conclude that the patient did not have the form of leukemia with which she initially was diagnosed, a form that required a different course of treatment, according to an article at the International Business Times.
The solution was discovered by the machine after it analyzed the patient’s medical information and cross-referenced it with millions of oncological records that doctors uploaded to its system from the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science.
This may one of the first instances of Watson making an impact doing what doctors haven’t been able to do before: analyze and compare huge amounts of health data in mere minutes.
Currently, IBM is working with the Department of Veterans Affairs, as part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative, to treat veterans with cancer. The computer’s technology will be provided for free to the VA for two years, and will be used to analyze genomic data, pinpoint potential cancer-causing mutations and identify potential treatments.
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