Dr. Mostafa el Sayed Works on Gold as a Cure for Cancer

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by Susan Eustis

Dr. Mostafa el Sayed has an invention that uses gold nano-particles and nanorods in medicine.  These nanomaterials are applied as a cure for cancer:  From cancer diagnostics to photothermal therapy, gold nano-particules appear to be useful.. Gold particles are provided by using nanotechnology in a manner that is useful in medicine because it can be heated once it is inside the body sticking to the tumors and the tumors then melt. The procedures elaborated by Dr Mostafa el Sayed and his students show how to manipulate atoms, molecules, and materials to form structures on the scale of nanometer, one billionth of a meter.  Animal trials are underway and human trials believed to be not far behind.

IBM Watson Positioned to Leverage a Knowledge Base at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

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by Susan Eustis

IBM Watson has been positioned to leverage a known knowledge base to assist in cancer diagnosis.  Facilities that are leading in their field provide direction for the automated process computer.  Computer-assisted surveillance will play an increasingly important role the in helping clinicians diagnose cancer conditions.

Melanoma is treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.  Clinicians there are interested in how Watson can be used to provide a more consistent approach to care delivery across the entire medical spectrum.  Watson technology has the potential to help clinicians identify suspicious lesions in a more consistent manner, and act as an aid to achieving diagnosis of an individual concerning lesions.  Melanoma and cutaneous malignancies are matters of interest.

Watson, an IBM computer represents a change in computer evolution. It can understand natural language.  Based on this understanding, it can query a huge database to come up with a clinical diagnosis.

IBM is developing the ability of Watson to interpret radiological images.  The system is learning how to diagnose melanoma images.  It needs to be taught in the same manner that medical students need to be taught.  There are other systems that can assist in identifying and diagnosing lesions and these support the clinician and the decision support computer systems.

The value of Watson is that once it learns how to achieve a diagnosis, it will be able to be updated once and used millions of times.  It is impossible for clinicians to keep up with every possible piece of information in the medical literature.  Diagnostic tools like Watson can scan known conditions and can point out differential diagnoses that a clinician might not have considered.  Using computers to assist in diagnosing melanoma and other cancers depends on having the computer trained at a leading medical center.  .

In terms of identifying images and following changing lesions, a computer would need pictures from every patient visit.  The aim is to create a system in which a patient walks through the door and gets a  picture taken as part of the visit to the clinician.

Over time, one problem with using multiple images is registering the images in a manner that permits comparisons.  The difficulty occurs because patients’ bodies change.  Curved surfaces and 2D images, make registration and comparison difficult.  3D images solve this problem, making registration easier.  In this manner computers are being trained in much the same manner that medical students are being trained.

Cleveland Clinic and IBM Watson Innovation

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by Susan Eustis

Cleveland Clinic supports emerging cardiovascular technologies that implement automated process, including IBM Watson.  IBM Watson is learning from a hospital system widely regarded as having one of the best heart care programs in the world.   Watson is being introduced to the clinicians as way to implement automated process in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.  The aim is to potentially improve health care delivery with the use of technology, including Watson.

To leverage technology to deliver what the best hospitals and best clinicians know is a fundamental opportunity in the healthcare delivery industry.  Clinicians who are leading know the most about care delivery.  The aim is to get out what they know to all the facilities that need to provide care delivery.

Cleveland Clinic is an acknowledged leader in diagnosis and care delivery.  The Cleveland Clinic has been able to attract leading clinicians, and they are encouraged to work with leaders of major industry associations that represent pharmaceutical research companies, biotechnology and the medical technology industry.  The aim is to articulate directions in research..

IBM Watson is being tasked with looking at cardiovascular innovation from a patient’s perspective.  The technology in cardiology has exploded in the last few years, illustrating the impact of innovation.  Cleveland Clinic cardiologists and surgeons are representative of how leaders in the care delivery system can evolve a role to work to shape technology.

Technology is only as good as the experts that shape it.  Technology does not evolve from a survey or looking at many patients, it is a result of having input from the most knowledgeable people who practice medicine.

IBM Watson is positioned as providing an innovation, a medical breakthrough.  Cleveland Clinic doctors are intensely interested in how Watson will reshape health care in the coming years.  Watson from IBM promises to be a game-changing technology that will have high impact.

 

 

50 Years of IBM Healthcare Automation

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by Susan Eustis

IBM is marking the 50th Anniversary of the first electronic medical record EMR.     February 18, 50 years ago the first electronic medical record system was installed at a children’s hospital in Akron, Ohio. Akron Children’s Hospital in 1962, worked with IBM to build the first computer-based patient information system to centralize patient records, allow sharing of patient information, eliminating of paperwork, and alerting of nurses when patients needed their medications.

Progress in major electronic medical records systems by Kaiser and Mayo have carried early implementations ideas forward. Now IBM is taking a quantum leap forward by implementation of Watson for healthcare.

Fifty years after Akron Children’s made history, only 1% of hospitals are really using them to their full potential. Watson is positioned to facilitate the physician diagnostics process through sophisticated automation. More about Watson at

http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/ca/en/healthcare/files/smarter_healthcare_brochure.pdf

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/smart-analytics-system/industry/healthcare-provider.html

and
www.wintergreenresearch.com/blog

IBM has smart analytics system healthcare provider solutions as well.  The IBM Smart analytics system gives healthcare provider’s workload optimized predictive analytic solutions.  The aim is to uncover patient insight, to reduce member risk, and to increase plan effectiveness.

An integrated platform provides healthcare providers broad analytics capabilities.   This is a significant automated process platform that provides a foundation for solutions that make a difference in people’s lives.

Watson’s One-Year Jeopardy Anniversary – What Next?

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What does the future hold for IBM Watson?

By Jane Clabby

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Watson’s Jeopardy appearance. IBM’s Dave Ferrucci, Lead Researcher for Watson, had some interesting data to share as well as some thoughts about the Watson technology and the kinds of things that Watson could do in the future. In his Smarter Planet blog, Ferrucci shared the following “one year later” statistics.

  • 15 million viewers watched the Jeopardy rerun
  • 5 Congress members competed against Watson
  • 386 Universities are collaborating with IBM on Watson and Analytics
  • 34 million people potentially benefitting from Watson through WellPoint Health Plans

Ferrucci believes that we are entering a new era of computing where machines will be increasingly capable of learning.  He goes on to say that these intelligent machines will be capable of ingesting huge volumes of knowledge captured in human language and then, by interacting directly with humans, will be able to predict the impact of certain decisions.  By doing so, nations, cities or states (for example) would be able to determine the best course of action in a given situation or what policy decision would be best — without personal or political bias. Ferrucci outlines several steps which are required to get Watson to this point: 1) extend the information Watson understands from answering specific questions to problem-solving (2) expand Watson’s abilities to include rich conversations with humans 3) enhance Watson’s ability to explain results and (4) change how Watson learns so that he can continuously gather information in specific areas.

As part of the first anniversary milestone, IBM also poses a question via twitter, #WhatShouldWatsonDoNext? I checked it out and there are some interesting responses. Here are several examples (1) “participate in presidential debates”, (2)“identify content of images and photos” (3) “support interactive triggered oral response for apps, so translate an oral question in an application command” (4)  ” advise government on how to spend tax money in a fair way” (5) “cure cancer”. But my personal favorite has to be “make up its own mind”, and perhaps someday Watson will be able to do just that.

Prospect of Using Watson Computing to Tackle New Drug Development

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by Susan Eustis

The doctors who attended the IBM clinical rounds lecture by IBM at Lahey clinic on February 10 were talking about the prospect of using Watson computing to tackle new drug development.  They wanted to know more about what the implications were.  Drug development was mentioned as one of the aspects of the presentation at Lahey clinic by Dan Cerutti General Manager, IBM Watson for Healthcare.

Watson is a collection of processors, not greatly different from what are used in  a desktop computer, but implemented on a massive scale.  Whereas in a desktop computer  might have one or two processors, in the typical Watson supercomputer there are thousands of those processors.

At the Lahey Clinic Medical Center, Burlington Medical Grand Rounds this was all the buzz, “What does he mean that Watson can be used to develop new drugs faster?”  .

Part of the meaning is that on the Watson computer because there are so many processors, and that they are all interconnected, there is just a lot of pure automated process available to search out different scenarios and develop answers.  Because the kzillions of processing modules on Watson can all work together and share information back and forth, there is .more intelligence being applied to a problem.  Watson does not get tired, it works 24 hours per day, 365 days a year.  The IBM Blue Gene computer can perform 25 trillion computations every second, making it tens of thousands of times faster than a home PC.

John Wagner at the IBM Research Collaboration for Life Sciences group commented recently that “what used to take many days can now be done in several minutes.”  Watson can tackle  much larger problems than a team of humans can.  This holds the opportunity for science to progress in a dramatic manner, faster than has been possible in all of human history before now.

This means that Watson by offering more computing power changes the landscape of science, the problems that are addressed and the scale on which they are thought about lets scientists do new things that could not be done before.

One can imagine that as the system develops the ability to model how drugs interact with their targets and how they affect an organism as a whole, that the scientific process begins to show signs of benefiting from automated process.

The physicians at Lahey were wanting to know what happens when Watson begins to attack drug development problems, they were kind of excited.  There was the feeling that  the revolution seems to have already begun.

The aim is to drastically reduce that time of discovery. The ability to simulate very powerful simulations, complex simulations and, reduce the time it takes to discover new drugs, this is a major breakthrough.  Potentially 80% of the time it now takes to discover a drug could be eliminated with automated process.  .

 

Watson at Work at Cedars-Sinai

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Watson will assist physicians in oncology diagnosis and treatment

By Jane Clabby

As part of IBM’s joint agreement with WellPoint to develop healthcare solutions based on Watson technology, Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute will provide clinical expertise and input to the solutions being developed. The focus will be on oncology medicine, one of the areas that IBM believes holds the most promise for Watson analytics.

Cedars-Sinai is known as one of the leading cancer institutions in the United States– well known for its track record in diagnosing and treating cancer.  As part of the project, physicians at Cedars-Sinai will recommend clinical content and assess what type of tools will be developed that will produce a Watson-based solution.

In a complex field such as oncology— that advances so quickly— decision support tools based on Watson will enable a broad range of physicians access to new and emerging diagnosis and treatment options. According to Monoj Saxena, general manager for Watson solutions at IBM, the volume of medical information doubles every five years, with content in oncology scaling even more quickly. Practicing physicians simply don’t have the time to pore over medical journals to keep current and up-to-date. This is where Watson shines – Watson can ingest volumes of data (structured and unstructured) and look for patterns and relationships.  Transformed into evidence- based treatment options, this data can be delivered to the physician almost instantaneously.  By assisting the physician, Watson can improve the speed and accuracy of patient diagnosis and treatment.

Dr.  M. William Audeh, M.D., medical director of the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute at Cedars Sinai will work with WellPoint’s clinical experts to determine how Watson solutions will be developed and delivered and how those solutions will interact with doctors and patients to improve cancer treatment.

Daniel Cerutti, General Manager, IBM Watson for Healthcare Speaks on Breakthrough Technologies at Lahey Clinic

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by Susan Eustis

Today Friday, February 10, there was a 7:30 am lecture at the Lahey Clinic Medical Center, Burlington Medical Grand Rounds.  The topic: Breakthrough Technologies Impacting Healthcare featured the speaker: Daniel Cerutti, General Manager, IBM Watson for Healthcare.  His objectives: were to educate the audience on Watson breakthrough technologies positioned to impact healthcare over time.  The aim was to introduce new business models in healthcare and solicit ideas for applications of this new technology.

In attendance were many physicians from Lahey, among them Dr. John L. Przybylski leader of the membership primary care practice Physicians for Prevention .  Dr. Przybylski noted that he thought that the IBM general manager Daniel Cerutti explained the Watson opportunity very well.  Dr. Przyblski liked idea of having Watson concentrate on cancer initially.  “As multiple studies are done, patients get a better treatment with a system like the IBM Watson.”, according to Dr. Przyblski.

“It is hard to be up to date in all aspects of medicine with the quantity of information doubling every five years.  Watson is not there to replace doctors, with the knowledge explosion Watson is having an effect of helping doctors with being up to data with the latest technology and the latest results.  These results really help medicine.”

Physicians for Prevention offers highly personalized medical care to its members with extended patient-physician appointments, 24/7 physician availability, same or next day appointments, and customized, preventative nutrition and exercise wellness programs. Seminars focus on medical topics relevant to patients.

“I became a doctor because I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives,” said John L. Przybylski, MD. “Physicians for Prevention allows me to effectively deliver the best possible care to my patients. It’s a shared advantage.”

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Watson Content Analytics at Seton Healthcare Family

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Seton Healthcare Family will use Watson technology to reduce costly hospital readmissions

By Jane Clabby

On October 25, 2011, IBM announced IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare, software that employs Watson-type content analytics. Using this solution, healthcare organizations will gather, extract and analyze clinical information and patient data to predict future outcomes.

IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare uses Watson’s natural language processing, enabling unstructured patient and medical data to be analyzed including doctor notes, patient registration and discharge data. The solution combines this type of data with information contained in medical journals and other clinical sources and is capable of understanding the underlying relationships to gain insight and improve predictions.  Like Watson, the solution is optimized for IBM Power Systems– ideal for applications that require high throughput and complex analysis of structured and unstructured data.

Seton Healthcare Family is the leading provider of healthcare services in Central Texas, serving an 11-county population of 1.8 million. For Seton Healthcare Family, being able to analyze unstructured data is the key to understanding patient patterns that lead to readmission. As the first customer to adopt the solution, they will focus on identifying the cause of hospital readmissions in order to reduce preventable hospital visits (according to the New England Journal of Medicine 1 out of every 5 readmissions can be prevented). Changes in Medicare policies in 2012 will penalize hospitals for high readmission rates. By employing this solution, Seton Healthcare Family hopes to decrease costs associated with readmission and improve patient care to prevent unnecessary readmissions. 

According to IBM, new content and predictive solution services will also be offered through its Business Analytics and Optimization initiatives, which includes a new center of competence for Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA)-based text analysis solutions.

What is Watson made of?

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By Jane Clabby

A  look at Watson’s components

When I was recently asked the question “What storage is Watson using?” I became curious not only about the storage aspect of Watson but also about its other components. I came upon Tony Pearson’s Inside System Storage blog that filled in the details for me.

Watson is comprised of ninety IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage.  The POWER 750 servers have four POWER7 processors, with eight cores apiece, for a total of 2880 POWER7 cores to achieve 80 Teraflops. Watson runs the Linux operating system.

Watson’s storage is “a modified version of IBM Scale-Out NAS (SONAS) that IBM offers commercially, but running Linux on POWER instead of Linux-x86. System p expansion drawers of SAS 15K RPM 450GB drives, 12 drives each, are dual-connected to two storage nodes, for a total of 21.6TB of raw disk capacity. The storage nodes use IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS) to provide clustered NFS access to the rest of the system. Each Power 750 has minimal internal storage mostly to hold the Linux operating system and programs. When Watson is booted up, the 15TB of total RAM are loaded up, and thereafter the DeepQA processing is all done from memory.”

All Watson’s information is contained within the system — Watson isn’t using the internet or anything on an external network to access answers to questions.  This means that as Watson is applied to real-world applications in health care, financial services or other industries, the “Watson” will be purpose-built for that application. In other words, a Watson used for a healthcare application will contain only data relevant to that particular healthcare application.