IBM Corp. will now use its Watson supercomputing technology to spot deadly diseases.

The company announced a partnership with more than 15 health systems, academic medical centers, ambulatory radiology providers and imaging technology companies on Wednesday to use Watson to extract previously “invisible” imaging data from medical scans.

IBM IBM, -1.72% said it will then compare the extracted data across a wide spectrum of other sources, such as electronic health records, radiology and pathology reports, lab results, doctors’ notes and medical journals, to help detect deadly diseases like breast and lung cancer, diabetes, brain disease, heart disease and related conditions, such as stroke.

The idea is that this large pool of information will help doctors make more personalized care decisions for specific patients, while adding to the body of data about diseases and other conditions to help researchers find cures or help medical professionals aid in prevention.

“There is strong potential for systems like Watson to help to make radiologists more productive, diagnoses more accurate, decisions more sound and costs more manageable,” said Nadim Michel Daher, a medical imaging and informatics analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Big Blue said the partnerships, which include the likes of Mednax Inc. MD, -1.99% , UC San Diego Health, Radiology Associates of South Florida and Sheridan Healthcare, could help save the health-care industry millions of dollars in costs due to inefficiencies within the health-care system.

To start, Watson, a machine-learning technology that can gather data from many sources and analyze it instantaneously in a phenomenon known as “big data,” will be taught about things like cardiovascular disease and eye health using data provided by the partner institutions.

Members of the collaborative, for example, could train Watson to detect cardiovascular disease early and identify commonly overlooked heart health conditions, such as congestive heart failure or heart attack. For early disease detection, Watson could be trained to analyze a coronary angiogram, which is a video image of a beating heart, and then give it a Syntax score that could then help be used by physicians to determine whether a patient with coronary artery disease should be referred to get a stent procedure or a coronary artery bypass graft procedure.

The supercomputer, which once beat the world’s smartest people on the game show “Jeopardy,” could also be trained to identify congestive heart failure by learning how patients’ hearts are likely to start failing and then monitoring disease progression.

This is part of a much broader initiative within IBM to use big-data analytics through Watson to help people better perform their jobs and fuel new innovation. Other recent partnerships have included setting up hyperlocal weather forecasts so retailers can better predict how changes to weather might impact their sales, and a partnership with Local Motors to build self-driving minibuses.

IBM doesn’t break out revenue from its Watson unit yet, despite the fact that it has been expanding rapidly. At the Code Conference earlier this month, IBM CEO Virginia Rometty said the unit was “still growing,” but that disclosing its financials wouldn’t add value at this time.

Shares of IBM closed down 0.7% to $152.92 on Wednesday. They’ve risen 3.2% over the past three months, but remain down nearly 9% over the past year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, is up 1.1% over the past three months but down just 2% from a year ago.