Will the rise of the machines imperil radiologists? - MedCity News

At the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference that concluded last week, the majority of panelists on a panel discussing digital health dismissed artificial intelligence in healthcare as overhyped. Deborah DiSanzo, general manager of IBM Watson Health, who presented her company's vision at the conference in San Francisco and Vinod Khosla, founder of investment firm Khosla Ventures, who spoke at a satellite conference beg to differ. IBM Watson Health, with its acquisition of Merge Healthcare, has amassed a vast volume of imaging data – 30 billion to be exact -- and is putting its machine learning power to work. In a question-and-answer session following her presentation, DiSanzo explained that Watson can actually prioritize the image stack in a CT scan for example, and tell radiologists which images to see first and not waste time in viewing images that have nothing in them. What's more, the technology can also pull in unstructured text data from an electronic health record to provide context and decision-making support to the radiologists, DiSanzo explained.