In China, IBM Watson Partners With Hospitals To Fight Cancer

IBM said it has established a beachhead in China for its Watson artificial intelligence system, which will be used to diagnose and treat cancer in a country of 1.4 billion people where access to oncology research is a problem.

IBM and its Beijing-based partner, Hangzhou CognitiveCare, will initially work with 21 hospitals across China to adopt “Watson for Oncology” to speed diagnosis and treatment and enable physicians to reduce wait times where there are major health disparities given the country’s population size alone. In China, there are 2.8 million deaths from cancer each year and about 12,000 cancer diagnoses every day, according to CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

“The number of cancer cases is rising and it’s the number one cause of death in China,” Dr. Kyu Rhee, IBM Watson chief health officer, said in an interview. “There are challenges in keeping up with evidence and knowledge. This is about scaling that knowledge and providing access to it in China.”

The 21 Chinese hospitals, which include a mix of urban and rural facilities, will use Watson to more quickly come up with more personalized treatment options from a database that includes the latest genetic information from “more than 300 medical journals, more than 200 textbooks and nearly 15 million pages of text” of medical content, IBM said.

The effort to personalize cancer care in China is a first for IBM Watson in the country though IBM has been operating in China for more than three decades, the companies said. The partnership with Hangzhou CognitiveCare builds on IBM Watson’s partnership with hospitals in India that was announced last year to bring artificial intelligence to another giant emerging market.

“Hangzhou CognitiveCare is eager to bring IBM’s Watson for Oncology to reach every oncologist in China we possibly can,” Hangzhou Cognitive Care’s chief executive, Zhen Tu, said in a statement.

Watson for Oncology was developed by IBM with oncologists from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and has the ability to read data from both “structured and unstructured” sources, which will be key in China given not all hospitals have electronic record systems, IBM executives said. In the beginning of the partnership, Watson for Oncology will be available only in the English language but Hangzhou Cognitive Care is “localizing the language,” the companies said in a joint statement released Thursday morning.

“IBM is committed to working with CognitiveCare as the first mover in China to bring Watson Health technologies into this market,” Deborah DiSanzo, IBM Watson Health general manager, said in a statement.