Medical
decision making can be extremely challenging. Physicians are counted on to make
the correct diagnosis and choose the proper treatment for each patient. If
they’re wrong, the patient suffers. If they’re terribly wrong, the outcome can
be even worse.
So why not give doctors some computing
intelligence to help improve their results?
That’s one of the challenges that that
inspired scientists at IBM Research – Haifa
to help transform healthcare globally. In fact, the Haifa lab is the
lead location for healthcare-related work among IBM’s 9 laboratories
worldwide–and making the most of medical information is one of its key focuses.
“The important thing to realize is that data is king in healthcare. We can
transform decision making, and we can use genetic insight to make personalized
medicine possible,” says Haim Nelken, manager for integration technologies at
IBM Research – Haifa.
It’s no surprise that the topic for the
colloquium being conducted there today is The Future of Healthcare. The
colloquium is part of an IBM centennial program designed to convene thought
leaders – including leading scientists, academics, leaders of industries,
public policy makers and IBM clients — for a series of talks and panel
discussions on transformational technologies and their potential impact on the
world.
The Haifa colloquium will include
presentations by IBM scientists and outside experts, including Jonathan Halevy,
director general of Israel’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, who will speak about
the doctor-patient relationship in the Internet era, Dieter Enzmann, chair of
UCLA radiology, who will discuss the digital transformation of medical imaging,
and Itsik Pe’er, professor of computer science at Columbia University, who will
speak about the role of computation in human genetics. The main focus is on the
transformation of the decision making process.
The IBM research team in Haifa is working on
technology that could provide physicians valuable new tools to help with
diagnosis and treatment. They’re experimenting with natural language processing
and machine learning, just like the core capabilities in the Watson machine.
But, in addition, they’re exploring the possibilities of infusing new data and
knowledge—including know-how from physicians about best practices and genetic
data.
Nelken says the research is done with the
awareness that all of the participants in the healthcare ecosystem will use the
new information science tools in ways that researchers can’t predict. That
means the solutions they come up with have to be flexible. For example, we
might even see something like a smartphone app store specializing in
applications and services that help people use medical information.
One service might review the medical
information from a family and predict the diseases and medical conditions to
which the family members are vulnerable. This will allow people to get
check-ups and early warnings of looming problems–or allow them to change their
lifestyles to reduce the potential for having specific health problems. Perhaps
insurance companies will even offer special policies for individuals based on
genetic information.
Many scientific and policy challenges that
will have to be overcome for this vision to become a reality. “We’re beginning
to have access to a lot of genetic information, which could lead to truly
personalized medicine. But tailoring medicine to an individual is no trivial
matter,” Nelken says.
But that’s the goal of the healthcare research team in Haifa. Through
collaboration with other IBM researchers around the world and experts like
those speaking at the Haifa colloquium, they hope to take much of the
uncertainty out of the practice of medicine.
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