ZÜRICH and BAD NEUSTADT,
Germany, Oct. 18, 2016
/PRNewswire/ -- Today, RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG (RKA), a private
hospital group in Germany, has
announced, that by the end of the year, it will begin piloting a
Watson-powered cognitive
assistance system to help support physicians at the group's
Centre for Undiagnosed and Rare Diseases located at the University
Hospital Marburg.
Since it opened in 2013, the renowned Center has been contacted
by more than 6,000 patients to visit Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schäfer, a
leading expert in rare diseases, who is also known as the
"German Dr. House," based on the character of the eponymous
American medical television drama. Most of the patients he and his
team meets with have year-long medical histories, which include a
large amount of unstructured data, such as laboratory tests,
clinical reports, drug prescriptions, radiology findings as well as
pathology reports.
"It's not uncommon for our patients to have thousands of medical
documents, leaving us overwhelmed, not only by the large number of
patients, but also by the huge amount of data to be reviewed," said
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schäfer, University Hospital Marburg. "This is
especially challenging because our work is often like searching for
the proverbial needle in the haystack -- even the smallest piece of
information could lead to an accurate diagnosis."
Currently, when the Center's expert physicians meet patients for
the first time, they conduct a thorough diagnosis by speaking with
the patients and carefully studying their medical history. This is
augmented by their own knowledge and experiences, medical journals,
online websites and expert tools – a process, which can take
several days for each patient.
Pilot phase at the "Centre for Undiagnosed and Rare
Diseases"
RKA has teamed up with IBM (NYSE: IBM) for a 12-month pilot project where
medical and technical scientists and designers from both companies
are working together to develop a cognitive assistance system for
rare diseases. Its overall goal is to support physicians to analyze
patient data to help them make decisions more quickly and
safely.
"The amount of medical knowledge continues to explode to the
point where it will double every 73 days by the year 2020.
Therefore, the planned use of cognitive technology such as IBM
Watson is intended to support our evidence-based and individually
optimized treatment for each patient," said Prof. Dr. Bernd Griewing, Chief Medical Officer,
RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG. "We are developing an assistance system to
facilitate the preparation and evaluation of existing patient
information before and during a consultation with physicians This
will help our doctors reach diagnostic decisions and select
appropriate treatment options."
Once the pilot begins, patients will fill out a digital
questionnaire developed by the medical staff in Marburg. This
questionnaire will anonymize the data and send it to Watson's APIs in the IBM Cloud, where the
relevant information will be extracted for the physicians.
As the patient information will be provided in German, the
cognitive assistant will use a natural language processing
algorithm for medical terminology developed by IBM Global Business
Services (GBS) to correlate the German questionnaire to the corpus
of English-based medical data to provide a differential
diagnosis.
"Using cognitive computing, we are building a list of
hypotheses, including their sources, which we then present to the
doctors for an ultimate data-driven diagnosis," said Dr. Matthias
Reumann, healthcare scientist and technical leader of the project,
IBM Research. "If one lab result is slightly outside of the normal
range, Watson may flag it for
further investigation."
RKA is providing the required specialist information and medical
knowledge as well as the IT system for the project and is
accountable for data protection regulations.
Vision of RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG for an optimized patient
management
The insight obtained from the project phase at the University
Hospital will subsequently be analyzed and used across other
hospitals of the group. The system is expected not only to help
physicians find a diagnosis, but also to support the process of
patient admission and provide the best possible patient routing.
This will prevent cost- and time-intensive misdirection of patients
to the wrong specialists or treatment plans.
"Optimized patient management is crucial for both the nationwide
medical treatment of tomorrow and the further development of our
company. In this context, digital solutions are becoming
increasingly decisive," said Jens-Peter
Neumann, Chief Financial Officer, RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG. "Our
cooperation with IBM is an important part of our innovation
strategy. In addition, we are focused on identifying and
collaborating with startups in the IT-driven healthcare sector to
strengthen our unique market position. Both medical and technical
efforts and improvements will serve our patients and create value
for our company."
Watch this video of the teams from Rhön-Klinikum and IBM:
https://youtu.be/MX7yUIj5-a0
Photos are available here:
https://www.flickr.com/gp/ibm_research_zurich/86G7y8
About the RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG
RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG is one of the largest healthcare providers in
Germany. At five medical sites
with a total of 5,300 beds we offer cutting-edge medical care with
a direct link to universities and research institutes. Our top five
key areas of treatment are cardiological and coronary disease,
neurological disorders, oncology, lung diseases as well as
orthopedic and accident surgery. A total of over 15,000 employees
work for RHÖN‐KLINIKUM AG. Our facilities are located in Bad Berka,
Bad Neustadt/Saale, Frankfurt
(Oder) and Giessen and Marburg.
Further information is available at: www.rhoen-klinikum-ag.com/
About IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
Watson represents a new era in
computing called cognitive computing, where systems understand the
world the way more similar to humans: through senses, learning, and
experience. Watson continuously
learns from previous interactions, gaining in value and knowledge
over time. With Watson,
organizations are harnessing the power of cognitive computing to
transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and
solve important challenges. Watson solutions are being built,
used and deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different
industries. Watson is open to the
world, allowing a growing community of developers, students,
entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts to easily tap into the most
advanced and diverse cognitive computing platform available
today.
For more information on IBM Watson, visit: ibm.com/Watson and ibm.com/press/watson. Join the
conversation at #ibmwatson.
About IBM Research
For more than seven decades, IBM Research has defined the future
of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12
labs located across six continents. Scientists from IBM Research
have produced six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals of
Technology, five U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing
Awards, 19 inductees in the National Academy of Sciences and 20
inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame. For more
information about IBM Research, visit www.ibm.com/research.
Press contact:
Achim Struchholz
Head of Corporate Communications, RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG
Tel. +49 9771 65 1328
achim.struchholz@rhoen-klinikum-ag.com
Chris Sciacca
Communications, IBM Research
Tel. +41 44 724 8443
cia@zurich.ibm.com
Lorie Fiber
Global Communications, Watson Health
+1-646-318-0575
lfiber@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM