IBM's Watson is helping Manipal Hospital crack tough cancer cases

BENGALURU: When a middle-aged woman with recurrent bilateral breast cancer - a rare form of breast cancer - approached Manipal Hospital in the city for treatment, the multidisciplinary team including oncologists and other specialists tried all the known and standard drugs and chemotherapy on her. The patient did not respond to any of them.

It was around this time, late 2015-early 2016, that IBM had entered into a collaboration with Manipal Hospital to pilot its Watson cognitive technology platform for oncology in India. "The lady's case was very complicated. So we decided to refer it to Watson. When we fed the patient information into Watson, it threw up several treatment options in a split second," said Dr Somashekar S P, chairman and the head of department of Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Centre.

Watson, he said, used genomics analysis and came up with treatment lines that were different from those advocated by the multidisciplinary team of doctors. "We adopted the therapy recommended by Watson and it suited the patient well," he said.

After several successful implementations in the US, Watson looks to be delivering results in India. Watson's artificial intelligence system has been trained by New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre, one of the best cancer treatment and research institutions in the world. It has been fed with millions of pages of medical literature including treatment guidelines, research, clinical studies, journal articles and patient databases. The system has the ability to read and make sense of disparate sources of data such as X-ray, ECG, lab reports, images, physician notes, tweets and even spoken words.

The objective is to find personalized treatments for every cancer patient by comparing disease and treatment histories, genetic data, scans and symptoms against the vast universe of medical knowledge. The best of medical researchers may take weeks of poring over medical records to determine the appropriate line of treatment. But Watson can, as Dr Somashekar found, do it in seconds. Cancer treatments are particularly complex because, depending on the DNA of the person and other factors, some medicines work better than others.

"There have been several cases in the past four months where Watson has enabled us to find tailor-made solutions for patients within no time," Dr Somashekar said, adding that Watson was initially used only for complicated cases, but now is being used routinely for all cases.

Starting July, the hospital will allow a cancer patient to directly ask for a Watson report, instead of a doctor's prescription. "A Watson report gives the patient not only the first and best treatment option but also the second best, the third best and so on. The patient can choose one depending on feasibility and affordability," Dr Somashekhar said.

Watson can particularly benefit patients in smaller cities and towns where there is a dearth of oncologists and absence of multidisciplinary teams. Patients can take the Watson report from Manipal Hospital and get the treatment in any hospital of their choice. The fees for Watson reports is yet to be determined.

Anthony Menezes, IBM's Asia vice-president, said personalized healthcare powered by Watson is all set to revolutionize how the world fights cancer.

IBM, which has just opened a centre in Singapore to bring together organizations, business partners and company experts in the Asia Pacific region to co-create business solutions that leverage Watson and other IBM capabilities, is planning to deploy Watson in a number of other areas in India. "We are in talks with some major clients in telecommunication and banking, who have shown immense interest in using Watson. We are also talking to the Indian government. We are hopeful that Watson will play a big role in the Digital India story," Menezes said.

One CEO, he said, wanted to know whether he could use Watson to make his customer interaction more effective. His call centre agents were finding it difficult to answer the plethora of calls from customers given the high complexity of the products and services. "The error rate was very high and so was attrition. In such cases Watson can be used to minimize errors and deliver smarter customer solutions," Menezes said.