When a 37 year old software engineer was recently diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer, it was already spreading fast, rising the risk of both the breasts being removed. Faced with the crisis she consulted Dr.Somashekhar S.P, one of the leading oncologists in the country at a Bengaluru hospital.
The doctor fed the patient’s info, including medical records and genomics data into Watson-the supercomputer from tech giant IBM. It took just about 60 seconds for Watson to come up with multiple treatment options as well as collect evidence specific to the patient’s health needs.
Watson assessed the tumor to suggest the drug to be used. For a faster diagnosis Watson relied on natural language processing and machine learning so that large amounts of medical data could be analyzed.
As Mr.Somashehar, the chairman, surgical oncology and HOD at the Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Center in Bengaluru said to The Hindu, an impressive 15 million pages are scanned with just a click of a button. He referred to Watson as “one more unbiased person” besides his team.
Thanks to the Watson-assisted treatment, both the patient’s breasts were saved from being removed. The doctors successfully shrank the tumour using medicines and surgically removed the remaining cancerous tissue.
Mr.Somashekhar thinks that the “most beautiful thing” about Watson is that it not just provides the best treatment options but also evidence.
The computer that mimics human thinking
To provide such insights, Watson gleans about 15 million pages of medical content-encompassing over 200 medical textbooks and 300 medical journals-for now.
Earlier, eight oncologists would have to manually study the medical journals. This learning would become the basis for devising treatment options-typically something that takes a couple of days. Not just that, the trial and error method meant that the treatment could end up really costly.
IBM’s supercomputer was named after Thomas J.Watson Sr., the first chief executive of the company. It clubs both artificial intelligence and analytical software so that it functions as a question-answering machine. The machine can answer questions which are posed in natural language. IBM developed the ‘Watson for Oncology’ with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, one of the premiere cancer centres in the world.
Manipal Hospital is the first Indian hospital that uses it. It gives them the ability to use the expertise of clinicians’ across different cancer types in conjunction with Watson’s cognitive computing technology . Largely, Watson mimics the way in which the human brain functions- by virtue of its self-learning systems that make use of data mining, natural language processing and pattern recognition.
Why IBM sees Watson as very relevant to India
According to Rob Merkel, vice president, oncology and genomics for IBM Watson Health, across the globe a physician gets about 15 minutes with the patient in which s/he should understand three smartphones worth of data and also 15 million pages of medical literature. In nations like India where the oncologists-cancer patients ratio is around 1:2000(in the US, it’s 1:100), this is very difficult. IBM thinks that it can level this gap using Watson.
Merkel sees Watson as the democratization of knowledge. To further scale up the platform in India, IBM is ready to engage with the government as well as start-ups and hospitals. In the US, the company has partnered with the government so that the US Department of Veterans Affairs-which operates the country’s largest integrated health care system,can access the technology.
This partnership is part of US Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot program. This will give 10,000 American veterans with cancer access to precision medicine.
In India, the number of lives lost each year to cancer is around 6,80,000. In fact, according to WHO cancer is the second leading cause for death in the country after heart diseases. About a million new cancer cases are diagnosed every year here-and it’s expected to rise five fold by 2020.
The future of medicine-AI seems here to stay
While Watson brings promise of better treatment , it’s by no means the only futuristic option. For instance- ‘CANScript’: a technology introduced by the Bengaluru-based startup, Mitra Biotech. Using CANScript, the doctors can predict the effect of drugs on cancer patients, factoring in the patient’s tumour microenvironment in vitro. It can also measure different functional parameters to judge whether a tumour is responding to a drug or not. Mitra Biotech was founded by Harvard and MIT researchers.
Incidentally, Pradip K Majumder, the Chief Scientific Officer at Mitra considers Watson as a very good initiative.
IBM’s Merkel is of the view that by 2020, medical knowledge will double about every thirty days- a rate of expansion that’s beyond the limits of human cognition. This is another reason why Watson becomes significant.
Watson’s dexterity in helping create a better drug/treatment in the ‘knowledge era’ is already evident. For example, with the aid of Watson, technology researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine has pinpointed those proteins which modify p53-a protein crucial in many cancers. This could lead to creating better drugs or treatments. An equally fascinating fact is that this was accomplished in mere weeks, thanks to Watson’s quick analysis of scientific articles related to p53-something human researchers would have taken years to perform.
Concerns about Artificial Intelligence
Overt dependence on AI could lead to hazards- a trope in sci-fi films but an idea which needn’t be devoid of logic. The death of a Tesla driver in the US last month-the first known fatal crash in a self-driving car has upped such concerns. The driver was watching a Harry Potter movie when the car collided.
Industry watchers are not too keen on the idea of too much dependence on Watson. They point out that there exists no laws in nations like Europe, US and Japan to govern AI.
However, Vanitha Narayanan, managing director of IBM India tries to assure when she says that Watson is not designed to replace the doctors, only to augment their skills and intuition.