IBM and Cleveland Clinic unveil Watson innovations

IBM announced two new Watson-related cognitive technologies stemming from a year-long collaboration with faculty, physicians and students at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.

The two projects, WatsonPaths and Watson EMR Assistant, are expected to help physicians make more informed and accurate decisions faster by acquiring insights from EMRs.

WatsonPaths uses its question-answering ability to examine complex scenarios by extracting statements based on the knowledge it has learned from physicians and medical literature. This ability to map medical evidence allows clinicians to consider new factors that may help them to create additional differential diagnosis and treatment options, according to IBM.

Eventually WatsonPaths will be available to Cleveland Clinic faculty and students as part of their curriculum and clinical lab simulations.

The second innovation, Watson EMR Assistant, seeks to unlock hidden insights within EMR data. Watson’s natural language expertise allows it to process an EMR with a deep semantic understanding of the content and can help clinicians quickly and efficiently analyze complex and disparate data. The goal of Watson EMR Assistant research project is collating key details in a patient’s past medical history and presenting to the physician a problem list of clinical concerns that may require care and treatment, highlight key lab results and medications htat correlate with the problem list, and classify critical events throughout the patient’s care, according to IBM.

“On Jeopardy! it was not necessarily critical to know how Watson arrived at its answer. But doctors or domain experts in any field will want to understand what information sources Watson consulted, what logic it applied and what inferences it made in arriving at a recommendation,” said Eric Brown, IBM, research director of Watson Technologies, in a release.