January 31, 2018 – Elekta announced it is collaborating with IBM Watson Health to offer Watson for Oncology with Elekta’s cancer care solutions. Under the terms of a new agreement, Elekta will sell Watson for Oncology beginning in early 2018 as a clinical decision support (CDS) solution paired within Elekta’s digital cancer care solutions, including the Mosaiq oncology information system (OIS). Elekta intends to offer both solutions in most markets around the world including the U.S., Brazil, certain major European and Asian markets, as well as India and Australia.
Cancer is responsible for one in six deaths around the world, and each year there are more than 14 million new cancer cases worldwide.(1) As healthcare providers and systems seek to enable data-driven, evidence-based cancer care, an explosion of medical information has created both challenges and opportunities to help improve quality of care. Currently, approximately 50,000 oncology research papers are published annually,(2) and by 2020 medical information is projected to double every 73 days(3), outpacing the ability of humans to keep up with the proliferation of medical knowledge.
Elekta CEO Richard Hausmann said the goal of the collaboration is to bring cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology to the cancer care continuum, including treatment planning, enabling evidence-based treatment recommendations for every patient regardless of where they are treated.
Watson for Oncology was developed by IBM in collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in New York. It can summarize key medical attributes of a patient, and provide information to oncologists to help them deliver treatment options based on training from MSK oncologists. Watson for Oncology ranks the treatment options, linking to peer-reviewed studies that have been curated by MSK. Watson for Oncology also provides a large corpus of medical literature for a physician to consider, drawing on more than 300 medical journals, more than 200 textbooks, and nearly 15 million pages of text to provide insights about different treatment options.
For more information: www.elekta.com, www.ibm.com/watson/health
References:
(1) World Health Organization, Cancer Fact Sheet: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs297/en/
(2) PubMed, accessed at pubmed.com
(3) Densen, Peter, Challenges and Opportunities Facing Medical Education 2011. Transactions in the American Clinical and Climatological Association. Accessed at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116346/
April 17, 2024 
