IBM’s cognitive computing system will be introduced to South Korea, a move that is expected to bring about changes to the country’s cancer diagnosis and treatment infrastructure.

Gachon University Gil Hospital in Korea said Friday it will sign a contract to introduce Watson Service from IBM as early as next week. The hospital will be the first in the Korean medical sector to adopt the AI system.

The Korean hospital said it will use Watson for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients. Currently, Watson is being used at U.S.-based MD Anderson Cancer Center to sift through mountains of data and provide doctors with valuable insights on patient conditions and treatment methods.

The AI system is also used for personalized medicine at Manipal Hospital in India and Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand.

Using millions of medical certificates, patient records and medical literature as big data sources, Watson is known to propose the best therapy to doctors.

Experts expect IBM’s Watson service could revolutionize cancer treatment and have a significant influence upon the domestic marketplace in cancer diagnosis and treatment as it is superior in accuracy although it will mostly serve as an assistant to doctors in the Korean hospital.

Watson’s strength is that the system’s judgment is based on big data covering non-medical data in addition to medical data of clinical trials and research papers. Genetic data used in medical care only represent 5 percent, while treatment and clinical trials represent 20 percent. The remaining 75 percent belong to non-medical areas, such as human behavior. Watson will consume these data fully to provide cancer care services based on evidence.

Watson had collected more than 600,000 data pieces by 2013 and has 42 medical journals and clinical trial documents where it has 2 million pages about information on oncology research alone.

By Lee Byung-moon

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