Manipal Hospitals adopts Watson for Oncology to help physicians identify options for individualized, evidence-based cancer care across India
IBM has announced that Manipal Hospitals’ corporate and teaching facilities will adopt Watson for Oncology, a computing platform trained by Memorial Sloan-Kettering that analyzes data to identify evidence-based treatment options, helping oncologists to provide cancer patients with individualized healthcare.
More than 200,000 individuals receive care for cancer at Manipal facilities each year. This will be the first deployment of Watson in India.
Based on research led by IBM computer scientists, Watson has the ability to read and understand natural language. Watson for Oncology was developed by IBM in concert with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), one of the world’s leading cancer centers. To date, Watson for Oncology has ingested nearly 15 million pages of medical content, including more than 200 medical textbooks and 300 medical journals.
According to the World Health Organization, cancer of all types claims approximately 680,000 lives each year in India, making it the second leading cause of death in the country after heart diseases. There are 1 million new cancer cases diagnosed every year in India, and this is expected to rise 5-fold by 2020.
Compounding the growing health challenge, India faces an acute shortage of oncologists, surgical oncologists and radiation therapists in the country. Industry data reveals the ratio of oncologists to cancer patients is about 1:1600 compared to 1:100 in the United States . Further, doctors face an increasing battle to stay up to date about best practices in treatment and care management.
“We are at an inflection point in India regarding cancer care, driven by the increasing number of cancer patients in India, fewer oncologists to treat them and the broad geographic footprint of our region. These challenges are amplified by rapid advances in personalized medicine, and an ever-growing amount and diversity of clinical evidence. All these factors compelled us to consider how a technology-based solution could help deliver at scale world class cancer care to our patients,” said Dr. Ajay Bakshi, Managing Director & CEO of Manipal Hospitals.