IBM Watson Health, Merge launch new personalized imaging tools at RSNA

IBM companies Watson Health and Merge Healthcare unveiled several new machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies for imaging at the RSNA Annual meeting in Chicago this week. Big Blue also showcased new advancements in how Watson technology can learn and gain understanding from image information, which researchers say now accounts for some 90 percent of all medical data. IBM has taken a keen insight in applying Watson's supercomputing capabilities to imaging – especially since its 2015 acquisition of Merge. Big Blue, in fact, is developing numerous tools to help automate analytics, enabling cross-reference X-rays, MRIs and other images against electronic health record data, lab results, genomic tests and more. At RSNA, Watson Health is showcasing: a cognitive peer review tool aimed at reconciling differences between a patient's clinical evidence and data in his or her EHR; a data summarization tool meant to give radiologists, cardiologists and others patient-specific clinical information when they're interpreting imaging studies; a decision support tool to enable physicians to integrate imaging data with other clinical information; the new MedyMatch "Brain Bleed" App, a cognitive image review tool intended to help ER docs diagnose strokes or brain bleed in trauma patients based on evidence in their patient records.