Healthcare professionals do exceptional work, often under intense pressure, tight time constraints, and increasing budgetary restraints. Getting tools that help them in their vital work should therefore be of the utmost importance.

Why IBM for Healthcare?

IBM offers a number of intelligent products designed for quicker, more effective diagnoses, and assist healthcare professionals in the following ways:

  • Improve patient outcomes
  • Histopathological classification of breast cancer cells
  • Embed AI into scanning machines to diagnose cervical carcinoma
  • Assessment of tumour proliferation
  • Detection of melanoma in dermoscopic images
  • More accurate disease detection
  • Pathologic image analysis
  • Optimise Health Care professionals’ safety
  • Reduce patient wait time at emergency rooms
  • Reduce fraud and billing errors

Data & Healthcare

One of the key products in the healthcare space is IBM’s GPU-accelerated compute platform which is unmatched for clinical/pharmaceutical data.

Deep learning enables IBM software to train itself using vast amounts of data. What this means is that practitioners using IBM products are able to draw on significantly larger resource pools than previously possible and are provided with continually self-improving results.

IBM Watson Machine Learning

IBM Watson Machine Learning can leverage system memory and GPUs to support more complex models and higher resolution data. This means that large complex visual images can be processed ultra-fast, allowing insights to be drawn from high definition scans in real time.

IBM PowerAI Vision

IBM PowerAI Vision bridges the gap between clinicians and data scientists and is the key to technological advancements in healthcare/life sciences. IBM PowerAI Vision is simple to use, so that subject matter experts can use image and video data to train AI models without any coding or machine learning skills. Understanding the insights available from IBM’s deep learning systems is quicker, as is patient diagnosis as a result.

Security is key to data especially in Healthcare and all IBM’s solutions offer end-to-end encryption. When handling sensitive data, users can rest assured they are building an AI solution with the security of Power Systems and IBM-secured open source frameworks.

Case Study: University College London Hospitals

Business Problem

Fast, accurate diagnoses of brain conditions rely on the imaging provided to neurologists by brain scans. The better the image, the greater the chance of spotting issues. However, increasing image quality means higher resolution, which in turn means a much greater quantity of data requiring processing.

Solution

Working with IBM Research, researchers and clinicians at University College London Hospitals were able to utilise the Large Model Support capability of IBM PowerAI. This provided an increase in resolution from 2mm to 1mm, an 8-fold increase in the amount of data, with minimal changes to their existing code. It represents a huge opportunity for the advancement of neurology.