Mayo Clinic Turns To IBM'S Watson To Match Cancer Patients With Clinical Trials

At its annual Transform symposium in Rochester Minn., Mayo Clinic unveiled today a partnership with IBM , which seeks to harness the power of its Watson supercomputer to match patients with the right clinical trials. Starting early next year, Watson will initially enroll patients with breast, colorectal and lung cancers based on eligibility.

There are 170,000 ongoing clinical trials around the world, however, according to the Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation, only 6% are completed on time. Enrolling patients in the right study is a time-consuming task; it takes at least one hour for a clinician to read through a trial’s protocol. Mayo runs more than 8,000 trials. By using Watson’s natural language processing, it hopes to reduce the task to seconds, and enroll more patients.

“The speed and accuracy that Watson can offer to include patients in clinical trials is what we’re hoping to achieve,” says Nicholas LaRusso, who spearheaded the partnership with IBM Watson at Mayo. “It [Watson] is currently the best technical support.”

Rob Merkel who’s Healthcare Leader in the IBM Watson Group, says the supercomputer already contains information on 170,000 studies. For the next three to four months, Mayo clinicians will be testing patient cases, feeding Watson key data pulled from electronic health records, such as gender, age, cancer stage, and co-morbidities. Watson will then scour trials to determine whether a patient’s case matches requirements.

IBM Watson’s presence in health care is increasingly growing, and includes MD Anderson, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Baylor College of Medicine, among others.