Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and IBM have agreed to collaborate on the development of a powerful tool built upon IBM Watson in order to provide medical professionals with improved access to current and comprehensive cancer data and practices. The resulting decision support tool will help doctors everywhere create individualized cancer diagnostic and treatment recommendations for their patients based on current evidence.

The initiative will combine the computational power of IBM Watson and its natural language processing ability with MSKCC’s clinical knowledge, existing molecular and genomic data, and vast repository of cancer case histories, in order to create an outcome and evidence-based decision support system. The goal is to give oncologists located anywhere the ability to obtain detailed diagnostic and treatment options based on updated research that will help them decide how best to care for an individual patient.

MSKCC’s world-renowned oncologists will assist in developing IBM Watson to use a patient’s medical information and synthesize a vast array of continuously updated and vetted treatment guidelines, published research and insights gleaned from the deep experience of MSKCC clinicians to provide an individualized recommendation to physicians. The tool will also provide users with a detailed record of the data and evidence used to reach the recommendations.

Development work is already underway for the first applications, which include lung, breast, and prostate cancers. The objective is to begin piloting the solutions to a select group of oncologists in late 2012, with wider distribution planned for late 2013. This collaboration complements an earlier announcement by IBM and WellPoint that the parties will focus on putting Watson to work on oncology solutions.

Source: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center