IBM is moving from helping hospitals run smoothly to lending a hand in the examination room.

International Business Machines Corp.’s planned acquisition of Merge Healthcare Inc., which sells systems that help doctors store and access medical images, is a crucial step in its plan to put artificial intelligence to use in medicine. IBM announced the $700 million deal last week.

Merge’s crown jewels are 30 billion images, including X-rays, computerized tomography, and magnetic-resonance-imaging scans, that IBM intends to use to “train” its Watson software to identify ailments such as cancer and heart disease. The resulting services, it hopes, will help doctors diagnose and treat patients more effectively and efficiently.

Google Inc., Yahoo Inc.’s Flickr unit and others use similar software to identify objects in photos. IBM is betting that the same technology that recognizes cats can identify tumors and other signs of diseases. The nascent effort could help IBM capture a larger slice of the $7.2 trillion spent world-wide annually on health care.

IBM’s deal also could reshape the $3 billion market for archiving medical images and breathe life into companies devoted to computer-driven interpretation of images. It highlights the value of such imagery, which typically is anonymized and shared by hospitals for research purposes, as the software technique known as deep learning becomes more prevalent in medicine.