IBM’s Watson Taking on Medical Imaging

Earlier this week, IBM announced they would be adding medical images to their Watson AI to help physicians better understand and diagnose illnesses. The announcement comes after an acquisition of health-imaging company Merge-Healthcare for $1 billion.

Over the past year, IBM has been teaching Watson to expand upon its already robust text recognition and analysis software into a similar image-based understanding. IBM estimates that over 90% of all medical data today is made up of items like CAT scans, X-rays, MRI’s and molecular images. The coupling with Merge’s software and Watson’s image recognition abilities will provide healthcare professionals a deep look into a patient’s medical history and the ability to make more sound decisions based on real data.

FDA to Develop Open Sourced Genomic Info Software Platform

The FDA announced on Wednesday (8/5/2015) its plan to create a precision medicine initiative aimed at the creation of a genetic information database containing data on over 1 million volunteers. The $215 million program would focus on several areas:

Recruitment and analysis of volunteers genetic makeup and expanded clinical trials for medications related to cancer treatment.

Funding to the NIH’s National Cancer Institute to study cancer causes and assist in drug development.

Database creation and regulatory structure to evaluate volunteers.

Development of interoperability standards and policies to address privacy and secure data exchange across systems.

The FDA will be working with several companies throughout the initiative in an effort to crowdsource disparate datasets, evaluate workflows and analyze, all with the goal of validating new approaches and advance the accuracy of next generation sequencing-based tests.

Lockheed Martin Launches Healthcare Alliance

Advanced technology company Lockheed Martin announced earlier this week its plan to create a healthcare alliance partnering with several tech giants including Cisco, Cloudera, Intel and Big Cloud Analytics. The latter two will be focusing on a collaboration to create internet of Things solutions for the group.

The partnership will focus on utilizing sensors and wearable devices to collect patient data and populate analytical platforms to help better understand individual and group health trends. The goal of the partnership is to develop healthcare technology that allows professionals to make better decisions on the care, diagnosis and the treatment of diseases.

This article is brought to you by Enola Labs, a custom software development company located in Austin, Texas focusing on simple healthcare solutions to complex problems.