IBM forms Watson Health medical imaging collaborative ZDNet

After several months of beefing up the Watson Health Unit, IBM on Wednesday announced it has recruited 16 other entities involved in the health care sector to from a new Watson Health medical imaging collaborative. The global collaborative aims to advance cognitive imaging in a range of medical specialties, from eye care to the treatment of heart and brain disease. The group plans to use Watson to analyze previously "invisible" unstructured imaging data, found in places such as radiology and pathology reports, as well as broad swaths of data collected from sources like population-based disease registries. "There is strong potential for systems like Watson to help to make radiologists more productive, diagnoses more accurate, decisions more sound, and costs more manageable," Nadim Michel Daher, a medical imaging and informatics analyst for Frost & Sullivan, said in a statement. "This is the type of collaborative initiative needed to produce the real-world evidence and examples to advance the field of medical imaging and address patient care needs across large and growing disease states."