ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM
(NYSE: IBM) today at HIMSS17 introduced IBM Watson Imaging
Clinical Review -- the first cognitive imaging offering from Watson
Health -- and announced the expansion of the Watson Health medical
imaging collaborative to 24 organizations worldwide, adding
clinical and industry expertise for the worldwide initiative
already tackling eye, brain, breast, heart and related
conditions.
The Watson Health medical imaging collaborative is an initiative
comprised of leading health systems, academic medical centers,
private radiology practices, ambulatory radiology providers, and
imaging technology companies that are finding ways to use medical
imaging to identify and predict the risk of cancer, diabetes, and
diseases of the eye, brain and heart and related conditions.
New collaborative members Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin, IDx LLC, PrivaCors,
Strategic Radiology, Sutter Health, Pacific Radiology Group,
University of Michigan and University of Virginia Health System join founding
members Agfa HealthCare, Anne Arundel Medical Center, Baptist
Health South Florida, Eastern Virginia Medical
School, Hologic, Inc., ifa systems AG, inoveon, Radiology
Associates of South Florida,
Sentara Healthcare, Sheridan Healthcare, Topcon, UC San Diego
Health, University of Miami Health
System, University of Vermont Health
Network, vRad, a MEDNAX (NYSE: MD) company and Merge, an IBM
company.
"The medical imaging collaborative is vital to Watson's ongoing training and the development
of cognitive imaging solutions to address the world's pressing
health challenges," said Anne Le
Grand, vice president of Imaging for Watson Health. "Members
of the collaborative helped design and curate data for Watson
Imaging Clinical Review, which we debut today at the HIMSS17
conference."
Watson Health will debut Watson Clinical Imaging Review, the
first cognitive imaging offering from IBM. The offering reviews
medical data including images to help healthcare providers identify
the most critical cases that require attention.
The first application for the offering is cardiovascular
disease, starting with a common condition called aortic stenosis
(AS). AS, which affects 1.5 million Americans1, occurs
when the aortic valve in the heart is narrowed, impeding blood flow
to the rest of the body and causing shortness of breath, tiredness,
and chest pain. A pilot study found that Watson Clinical Imaging
Review was able to help hospital personnel identify potential AS
patients who had not been previously flagged for follow up
cardiovascular care.
Using Watson Imaging Clinical Review, hospital administrators
may identify cases where follow up care is warranted and assure EMR
information is complete. It uses cognitive text analytics to read
structured and unstructured information in a cardiologist's medical
report, combines that with a variety of data from other sources
(e.g. EMR problem list), and extracts relevant information to
verify key data, including the diagnosis, is accurately reflected
throughout the health record.
"Watson Imaging Clinical Review is the type of targeted
AI-driven tool that providers could put to use to help them
standardize care delivered across their organization, and gradually
build a critical mass of reproducible results from their patient
population. In doing so, it can support a population health-driven
approach to personalized care," said Nadim
Michel Daher, a medical imaging and informatics analyst for
Frost & Sullivan.
"Out of the gate, this type of cognitive tool may provide big
benefits to hospitals and doctors, providing insights we don't
currently have and doing so in a way that fits how we work," said
Ricardo C. Cury, M.D., director of
Cardiac Imaging at Baptist Health of South Florida and chairman and CEO of
Radiology Associates of South
Florida.
IBM plans to supplement the release of this offering with nine
additional cardiovascular conditions, such as myocardial
infarctions (heart attacks), valve disorders, cardiomyopathy
(disease of the heart muscle), and deep vein thrombosis.
To learn more about Watson Imaging Clinical Review and other
work by Watson Health's imaging group, visit HIMSS17 booth #1712.
HIMSS17 -- the 2017 Health Information and Management Systems
Society Annual Conference and Exhibition – takes place this week at
the Orange County Convention
Center in Orlando, Florida. Go
online to learn about IBM Watson Health at HIMSS17 and follow IBM's
Watson Health's social media channels #IBMHealthcare,
#WatsonHealth, and #HIMSS17 for on-site activity
updates, times and locations, as well as timely insights from the
Watson Health ecosystem.
About IBM Watson Health
Watson is the first commercially available
cognitive computing capability representing a new era in computing.
The system, delivered through the cloud, analyzes high volumes of
data, understands complex questions posed in natural language, and
proposes evidence-based answers. Watson continuously learns, gaining in value
and knowledge over time, from previous interactions. In
April 2015, the company launched IBM
Watson Health and the Watson Health Core cloud platform (now Watson
Platform for Health). The new unit will help improve the ability of
doctors, researchers and insurers to innovate by surfacing insights
from the massive amount of personal health data being created and
shared daily. The Watson Platform for Health can mask patient
identities and allow for information to be shared and combined with
a dynamic and constantly growing aggregated view of clinical,
research and social health data. For more information on IBM
Watson, visit: ibm.com/watson. For more information on IBM Watson
Health, visit: ibm.com/watsonhealth.
Media Contact
Lorie Fiber
646.318.0575
lfiber@us.ibm.com
Questions and Answers for
Collaborative/Imaging Release
How/why were the new members of the collaborative chosen and
what do they bring to the table?
To help better manage populations of patients through the
Watson health platform,
Watson needs to draw data and
insights from a variety of patient care environments ranging from
stand-alone ambulatory settings to integrated delivery
networks.
The collaborative is designed to provide IBM Watson a real-world
experience and share real-world findings because one hospital may
use a different imaging machine, operational approach or medical
protocol. IBM needs a diverse group of imaging experts training
Watson and the collaborative will
provide that.
We also have to allow collaborative members to do their day
jobs, and to manage what are sometimes disruptive (albeit
necessary) processes inside health system IT departments, such as
an EMR upgrade. Pockets of time will certainly exist where a given
member can't focus on a project, so we have designed the
Collaborative to be multi-member, multi-geography, multi-type
organization in order to keep the important work we will do
together moving forward.
Why is a tool like IBM Watson Clinical Imaging Review needed,
and why was Aortic Stenosis chosen as the first release?
EMR systems are intended to make patient management and system
analytics easier and better. However, they often have
seemingly random, disorganized, and inconsistent structures.
With a move towards value-based reimbursement strategies and
a need to report data into the broader healthcare system, missing
information can be harmful at both the patient and system
level.
IBM Watson Imaging Clinical Review employs cognitive text
analytics and is a kind of cognitive 'peer-review' tool designed to
enable reconciliation of discrepancies between patient's clinical
diagnosis and administrative records to provide a more insightful
patient record. Additionally, it can have a significant impact on
the provider's bottom line
Early diagnosis and surgical intervention have traditionally
dramatically improved survival rates for a disease like AS. Timely
care is especially important for heart related issues such as AS
where it has been said that "time is muscle".
A retrospective study conducted by IBM and a large provider
looked at a population of 1,129 patients who were potential at risk
of having AS. The study showed that the provider had
identified 421 patients with AS who were having their AS managed
according to their EMR. In addition, using cognitive text
analytics, IBM identified an additional 23% of patients (97
patients) whose original echocardiogram and report documented
evidence of AS but this finding was not documented in the patients
EMR.
How does IBM Watson Clinical Imaging Review solve for
specific customer needs in a differentiated way?
IBM Watson Clinical Imaging Review reads the structured and
unstructured information in a report, cognitively understands this
data to extract clinically meaningful information, compares this
clinical data with EMR problem list and medical coding to empower
users to assure that the information in the EMR is accurate.
This tool serves as a process enhancement tool that supports
accurate and timely clinical and administrative decision making. It
supports patient flow from diagnosis to documentation eliminating
cracks in the system because of incomplete or incorrect
documentation.
Specifically, it identifies AS cases where evidence is present
in the final diagnostic report but is not reflected in the EMR
problem list and/or medical coding. Thus, it helps to validate that
the EMR problem list and medical coding align with the
cardiologist's clinical diagnosis.
It also provides an actionable report customized for different
users; this report highlights potential cracks in the process
discovered by Watson. Users can
either accept or reject Watson's
recommendation. If users accept Watson's recommendation on a particular case,
they can go in the EMR to update that particular case. If a
particular case is not resolved, it will continue to appear in the
discrepancy report until it is resolved.
Moreover, actions performed by users can be recorded for the
executive/manager level review.
When a customer implements IBM Watson Clinical Imaging
Review, what do they get?
Watson Health Imaging Gateway: This is a common gateway used to
route information between the site and the cloud. Each site
will get a gateway with their first implementation of a cognitive
offering and then leverage it for future offerings. As the
number of offerings increase, additional resources to the gateway
infrastructure may be required.
Professional Services (Implementation): The majority of this
effort will be to implement the gateway the first time.
However, as additional offerings are provided, additional
configurations may be required (e.g. adding support for another HL7
message type).
Professional Services (Training): Training will need to be
provided for each offering as it will introduce new functionality
and may target new users within the enterprise.
Software as a Service (SaaS): This will include both the
software on the gateway as well as the actual offering itself.
What additional offerings can be expected in the short term
and long term?
In the short term, we expect to supplement IBM Watson Imaging
Clinical Review first release for Aortic Stenosis by launching a
cardiology suite providing additional use cases such as myocardial
infarction, valvular disorders, cardiomyopathies, deep vein
thrombosis and many more. (All retrospective)
In the long term, we expect to expand IBM Watson Imaging
Clinical Review for retrospective analysis using cognitive text
analytics of Breast, and Brain diseases.
Additionally, we expect to launch a cognitive physician support
tool that seeks to recommend probability driven differential
diagnoses options upon analysis of vast amount of patient,
population and medical research data to help inform physician's
decisions for the patient.
1. Bach D, Radeva J, Birnbaum H, et al. Prevalence, Referral
Patterns, Testing, and Surgery in Aortic Valve Disease: Leaving
Women and Elderly Patients Behind. J Heart Valve Disease.
2007:362-9.
2. Iivanainen A, Lindroos M, Tilvis R, et al. Natural History of
Aortic Valve Stenosis of Varying Severity in the Elderly. Am J
Cardiol. 1996:97-101.
3. Aronow W, Ahn C, Kronzon I. Comparison of Echocardiographic
Abnormalities in African-American, Hispanic, and White Men and
Women Aged >60 Years. Am J Cardiol. 2001:1131-3.
To view the original version on PR Newswire,
visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/watson-health-medical-imaging-collaborative-expands-to-24-members-ibm-debuts-watson-clinical-imaging-review-the-first-cognitive-imaging-offering-300409957.html
SOURCE IBM