Transforming Cancer Treatment: Insights from IBM's Data-Driven Approach (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: At a time in my life I was the trauma coordinator for Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. My cousin came in as a patient into the hospital where I was working. The cancer in fact metastasized from his legs into his lungs and frankly he wasn't doing well and it wasn't looking like he would survive it. So the doctors collaborated and together came up with a very cutting edge and new way of treating him. He saved his life, but had he been in a more rural area where the access to that information wasn't available, he may not be with us today. I think the important thing is how we can bring that same kind of understanding and treatment to anybody who's in the position of treating cancer patients. The goal here at IBM Research is to take all of our considerable talent and assets and bring them to bear on how we can manage cancer. We do that using a lot of data.

Speaker 2: And IBM data is really at the core of what we do. It's all about being able to apply the power of analytics to the vast amount of data of different types to be able to derive insights from it, to transfer data to knowledge and to bring it to the physician's fingertips. We look at cancer research as an information science problem.

Speaker 1: There's a wealth of data and that can now be read using machine learning, natural language processing to get insights that we've never been able to capture before. I work with IBM researchers around the world, so there are 12 labs and about eight of them are doing IBM research in healthcare and life sciences. Those things range from imaging analytics to be able to look at images and be able to help with the diagnostics, to the lab on a chip, which is a way to do diagnostics more immediately in a doctor's office, and finally, into genomics.

Speaker 2: We have the ability to apply and develop new AI methodologies to make care more personalized so that each person can achieve the best possible outcome.

Speaker 1: My cousin is an adult now. Today, he is a surgeon who treats primarily pediatric cancer patients. I like thinking that the kind of insights that we can bring from the data and from the work that we do can help him on the forefront and his patients.