IBM has announced its plans to buy Merge Healthcare, the producer of a medical image management platform. The transaction, which costs a billion dollars that will be paid in cash, aims to provide IBM Watson’s system of cognitive computing the ability to manage medical images as part of the Watson Health project. This ability to “see” can potentially allow the Watson system to make a big leap forward.
The medical field is one of the first explored in the tests of the Watson system bu in April 2015 IBM decided to create the Watson Health business division exactly in order to develop these applications. Over the months several partnerships and some acquisitions were announced but so far the company focused on Watson’s ability to analyze written or spoken texts. With the acquisition of Merge Healthcare there’s the intention to make a big leap forward.
Merge Healthcare’s platform is used in the USA in more than 7,500 healthcare facilities but also in many research institutes and pharmaceutical companies around the world to manage an ever-increasing amount of medical images. Merging this platform to the IBM Watson Health Cloud could allow the cognitive computing system to make a huge leap forward and as a consequence Merge Healthcare’s systems’ users could receive a big help in their work.
IBM researchers estimate that the medical images generated by tests of various kinds constitutes at least 90% of medical records today and this causes many problems. Radiologists of some hospitals’ emergency rooms are buried by huge quantities of images that are estimated to as many as 100,000 daily. Despite technological advancements, most of the image analyzes are still done manually by doctors. Another problem is that there’s little integration between the images and other patients’ medical data.
With its ability to process huge amounts of data in a short time, Watson can be trained to analyze medical images using the many millions of them available in the Merge Healthcare’s users archives. Watson can also combine the analysis of new images with old ones and other medical data to provide doctors significant elements for a diagnosis very quickly.
This acquisition further enhances the capabilities of the IBM Watson Health Cloud platform, which will help doctors and researchers even more. A system capable of analyzing the results of new tests comparing them with existing data in a short time missing no details and never getting tired can be incredibly useful. In a hospital this could make the difference between life and death for a patient.
