July 10, 2018 — Guerbet announced it has signed an exclusive joint development agreement with IBM Watson Health to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) software solution to support liver cancer diagnostics. The AI software will focus on utilizing computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and care.
Through this collaboration, Guerbet and IBM Watson Health plan to co-develop clinical decision support solutions. The first, called Watson Imaging Care Advisor for Liver [1], is planned to be a diagnostic support tool that will use AI to automate the detection, staging, tracking, monitoring, and therapy prediction and response of primary and secondary liver cancer for clinicians. The IBM Research team will also work on development of the solutions leveraging prior research innovations.
Liver cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death worldwide,[2] and the fastest growing cause of cancer deaths in the United States.[3] About 83 percent of primary liver cancer cases occur in developing countries.[4] The liver is also a common site for metastases, particularly in the case of digestive cancers, in which nearly 50 percent of patients develop metastases.[5] The hope is that better characterization and earlier identification of these metastases may lead to an improvement in the chances of recovery.
Care Advisor for Liver will be designed to be compatible with the most common picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), making it easy to be integrated directly into the workflows of healthcare professionals.
Watson Imaging Care Advisor for Liver will be a part of a family of decision support tools powered by IBM Watson image analytics designed to inform radiologists' diagnostic decisions for their patients. These offerings are being developed with a shared objective to create insights derived from IBM Watson image analytics to help inform clinical decisions.
For more information: www.guerbet.com, www.ibm.com/watson/health
References
[1] Care Advisor is not yet a formally approved product name.
[2] http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer
[3] http://pressroom.cancer.org/LiverCancer2017
[4] https://www.wcrf.org/int/cancer-facts-figures/data-specific-cancers/liver-cancer-statistics
[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211568414000941
