According to a recent article, IBM Watson Health, one of the world's largest information technology companies, has launched a new global initiative involving 16 health systems that will help tackle the challenge of unstructured data in radiology images.
Unstructured data has been regularly recognized as one Achilles heel for the anatomic pathology profession. It means invaluable information about the cancers and other diseases diagnosed by surgical pathologists are "locked up," making it difficult for this information to be accessed in efforts to advance population health management (PHM) or conduct clinical studies. Similarly, medical imaging has an essential role in the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. And, like most anatomic pathology reports, medical imaging also is considered to be "unstructured" by data experts because it is not easily accessible by computers, reported Fortune magazine.
The Watson Health medical imaging collaborative is working to apply cognitive computing of radiology images to clinical practice. IBM aims to transform how physicians use radiology images to diagnose and monitor patients.
The initiative shows there is interest among key academic medical centers and other providers in big data, cognitive computing, and Watson. IBM describes Watson as the first commercially-available cognitive computing system accessible through the Cloud that can analyze high volumes of data and understand complex questions.
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