In early 2016, after IBM chairwoman GinniRometty announced that she was turning the company into a cognitive solutions & cloud platform company, IBM is taking steps to demonstrate the commercial value of Watson, its cognitive computing robot, beyond deep question answering.
For IBM, there are two landmark events in cognitive computing and artificial intelligence. One was the defeat of chess champion Garry kasparov by IBM’s DeepBlue computer more than a decade ago. Second, Watson, a 2011 intelligent computer named after the company’s founder, ThomasJ.Watson, won the quiz show “Jeopardy!” after three rounds of competition. The jeopardy! Champion. Watson’s score of $77,147 left the show’s two smartest human contestants in the dust.
Now, shrunk from a master bedroom to the size of three stacked pizza boxes and equipped with more than 30 apis, Watson is busy bringing the promising medical sector of cognitive commerce to the Chinese market
Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, its research and development products include editing robots, writing robots and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.
On August 12, 2016, WatsonforOncology (Watson oncology solution) entered China, representing WatsonHealth (Watson health) began to enter China. It will use cognitive computing technology to help the development of China’s medical industry and promote “cognitive medicine” in China.
Prior to that, Watson health was mostly used outside of China. Internationally, IBM acquired several smaller health data companies and formed partnerships with apple, Johnson&Johnson, and Medtronic after launching Watson healthcare in April 2015. And a partnership with CVSHealth, a big pharmacy chain.
This time, IBMWatson’s ambition is to promote cognitive medicine in China by working with government agencies, medical institutions, businesses and academic groups.
“One of the major challenges facing China’s healthcare sector is the unbalanced allocation of quality healthcare resources. Apart from policy and institutional solutions, we need to seek solutions through scientific and technological innovation,” he said. Chen Liming, chairman of IBM Greater China, explains.
Altered cancer diagnosis
Rometty’s view of cognitive business is that “the future is cognitive, and we are moving towards a cognitive Internet of things.”
However, the problem that the Internet of Things era brings to the current medical field is that the data is too jumbled.
According to rob merkle, head of the IBMWatson health and life sciences program, there are 700,000 articles published in the research field every year. Each researcher reads an average of 200 articles a year. “When all data sources are included, each person is able to generate 1100 terabytes of data. It’s way beyond human cognition, it’s impossible for the brain to process that amount of data.”
Thus, a system that can process these massive amounts of data on behalf of humans is eagerly awaited in today’s cognitive age.
Three years ago, memorial sloan-kettering cancer center partnered with IBMWatson to train the IBMWatson oncology solution.
It is based on a cognitive computing system that analyzes a large amount of data, including medical literature, patient health records, clinical trials and medical records, to make personalized, symptomatic, authoritative treatment recommendations for cancer patients.
Specifically, after obtaining the patient’s information, WatsonforOncology can continuously screen information from medical literature around the world, find the literature most relevant to the patient’s cancer, analyze authoritative related cases, and select possible effective treatment plans according to the patient’s symptoms and medical records.
According to the National Cancer Institute, there were about 1.7 million new cancer cases in the United States in 2016, with about 600,000 deaths. About 40 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer, which is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In about 15 minutes, Watson Oncology Solutions can complete an in-depth analysis that used to take months to complete. For each medical recommendation, the system provides evidence that doctors and patients can discuss.
The same cancer problem afflicts China today.
Statistics show that about 12,000 new cancer cases are diagnosed every day in China. For the doctor experts, to achieve accurate diagnosis of cancer not only need to know the best treatment for advanced practice, constantly on the depth of the tumor research data of large and complex study and analysis of their biggest challenges include increasing in seconds the huge amounts of data every day, including 80% of unstructured data (such as sound, behavior, etc.).
IBM and Hangzhou Cognitive Network Technology Co., Ltd. announced that 21 hospitals in China plan to use the IBMWatson cancer Solution, trained by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, to help Chinese doctors access personalized, evidence-based cancer treatment based on the cognitive computing platform.
The Watson Oncology solution is just one of many solutions Watson Health offers.
Guo Jijun, VICE President of IBM Greater China and General Manager of STRATEGY, said, “In March, IBM announced its formal transformation into a cognitive solutions and cloud platform company, and Watson Health is gaining attention with the introduction of Watson Oncology solution in China, which is a very important step in the company’s strategy. “In the future, we will see more applications of IBMWatson and cognitive computing in various industries. We will not only invent advanced technologies, but also apply these technologies to transform and upgrade the industry.”
In Chen liming’s opinion, Watson Health combines cognitive computing technology, cutting-edge scientific and technological innovation in medical biology with evidence-based medical big data, which can provide unique value in medical research, efficient diagnosis and treatment, cognitive care and personal health management.
The future of cognitive medicine
The medical environment that cannot be ignored is that in Today’s China, there are about 330 million hypertension patients, nearly 100 million diabetes patients, nearly 100 million chronic respiratory diseases, and about 4 million new cancer patients every year. These patients make nearly 7 billion visits to the hospital every year, which means a large amount of medical investment, which is a huge burden for individuals, families and the country.
So how much impact will cognitive computing, which enables machines and systems to understand, reason and learn, have on today’s medicine?
Dr. Shen Xiaowei, CHIEF Technology Officer of IBM Greater China and director of IBM China Research Institute, said, “In the era of big data, the data we use today is only a very small part, and many times it only includes electronic medical records, etc. And cognitive health bring imagination is to build a future oriented system with cognitive ability, can for the environment, the medical literature, medical image data, social, living habits, etc to understand and use health data, such as to automatic reading of a large number of literature, sum up experience, through the continuous increase of machine learning, effective support doctors decision etc.”
“The impact of technological change on the industry has been enormous. Unfortunately, the more successful a company is in its industry, the more likely it is to be reticent about new technologies, and the more hesitant it is to lead its own transformation, simply because it is not easy to change its own life.” Chen Liming emphasized that we should not underestimate the impact of technology on an industry.
Now IBM in these efforts focus on cooperation partners committed to apply cognitive technique in the field of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, by building a more accurate prediction model, realize the personalized prevention of disease, the best treatment through fusion from complex medical knowledge mining path and from data analysis to find the best clinical practice, help the doctor decisions, It greatly promoted the standardization and individuation of diagnosis and treatment.
Specifically, its cognitive healthcare cloud platform project will utilize IBM’s cognitive healthcare and industry cloud technology to build a complete cognitive healthcare cloud platform centering on disease management, starting from cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and diabetes, and taking patient similarity analysis and risk prediction as the starting point, so as to provide efficient chronic disease management system for doctors and patients.
“There are three very important aspects in chronic disease management,” said Xie Guotong, director of cognitive health research at IBM China Research Institute. The second is to provide personalized treatment through individualized patient classification and subgroup; The third is to provide better advice to physicians, and IBM’s cognitive computing technology can be continuously learned from scientific literature, educational guides and ongoing treatment records to support constructive decision-making support for physicians.”
Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.
Gu Chengming, vice President of Pfizer China, said, “By working with IBM China Research Institute, we can leverage the world’s leading cognitive technology and other scientific technologies to better understand the individual needs of patients, thus enabling doctors to achieve more efficient and targeted treatment. Pfizer wants to use science and our global resources to serve patients.”
In addition, IBM China Research Institute used cognitive technology, big data analysis and other technologies to help Fuwai Hospital develop a “death risk prediction model” for acute myocardial infarction, and show the weight of different risk factors on death in the hospital.
Watson Health’s goal in The Chinese market is to promote the development of cognitive medicine in China by cooperating with government departments, medical institutions, commercial institutions and academic teams.
“Our vision is to enable Chinese patients to enjoy first-class medical services at home, no matter in grassroots community hospitals or in remote mountainous areas.” Chen liming added.