How Watson for Oncology is advancing cancer care

IBM Watson project manager Leanne LeBlanc views analytics of healthcare data. Each person generates more than 1,100 terabytes of health-related data across his or her lifetime, the equivalent of more than 300 million books. What alarms Dr. Craig Thompson, president and CEO at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, is that 20% of cancer patients in the U.S. are misdiagnosed. Thompson made those remarks during an IBM investor briefing in February as he discussed the cancer hospital's partnership with IBM Watson. Three years ago, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and IBM Watson formed a partnership to develop Watson for Oncology, a cognitive computing system that can analyze large volumes of data including medical literature, patient health records, and clinical trials, to offer personalized, evidence-based treatment recommendations for cancer patients.