IBM’s AI Watson to help doctors diagnose rare, complex cases in Germany

To help physicians at the Center for Undiagnosed and Rare Diseases located at the University Hospital Marburg, Germany, one of the country’s largest healthcare providers, Rhön-Klinikum AG (RKA), will begin piloting a Watson-powered cognitive assistance system by the end of the year.

Watson is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform developed by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), an American multinational technology company. Watson uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data.

The Center for Undiagnosed and Rare Diseases at the University Hospital Marburg, since opening in 2013, has been contacted by more than 6,000 patients to visit Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schäfer, a leading expert in rare diseases, who is also known as the “German Dr. House,” based on the character of the same name in an American medical television drama.

He and his team mostly meet patients who have year-long medical histories, which include a large amount of unstructured data, such as laboratory tests, clinical reports, drug prescriptions, radiology findings as well as pathology reports.

Although the Dr. Schäfer says that it is not uncommon for their patients to have thousands of medical documents, they are still left overwhelmed both by the huge number of patients and the amount of data they need to review.

“This is especially challenging because our work is often like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack — even the smallest piece of information could lead to an accurate diagnosis,” he said.

Currently, when the Center’s expert physicians meet patients for the first time, they conduct a thorough diagnosis by speaking with the patients and carefully studying their medical history. This is augmented by their own knowledge and experiences, medical journals, online websites and expert tools – a process, which can take several days for each patient.

With the overall goal of helping physicians analyze patient data and make decisions more quickly and safely, RKA and IBM has teamed up for a 12-month pilot project where medical and technical scientists and designers from both companies are working together to develop a cognitive assistance system for rare diseases.

The assistance system will facilitate the preparation and evaluation of existing patient information before and during a consultation with physicians, which will help doctors reach diagnostic decisions and select appropriate treatment options.

“The amount of medical knowledge continues to explode to the point where it will double every 73 days by the year 2020. Therefore, the planned use of cognitive technology such as IBM Watson is intended to support our evidence-based and individually optimized treatment for each patient,” said Prof. Dr. Bernd Griewing, RKA Chief Medical Officer.

Once the pilot begins, patients will fill out a digital questionnaire developed by the medical staff in Marburg. This questionnaire will anonymize the data and send it to Watson’s APIs in the IBM Cloud, where the relevant information will be extracted for the physicians.

As the patient information will be provided in German, the cognitive assistant will use a natural language processing algorithm for medical terminology developed by IBM Global Business Services (GBS) to correlate the German questionnaire to the corpus of English-based medical data to provide a differential diagnosis.

RKA is providing the required specialist information and medical knowledge as well as the IT system for the project and is accountable for data protection regulations.

The insight obtained from the project phase at the University Hospital will subsequently be analyzed and used across other hospitals of the group.  The system is expected not only to help physicians find a diagnosis, but also to support the process of patient admission and provide the best possible patient routing. This will prevent cost- and time-intensive misdirection of patients to the wrong specialists or treatment plans.

“Optimized patient management is crucial for both the nationwide medical treatment of tomorrow and the further development of our company. In this context, digital solutions are becoming increasingly decisive,” said Jens-Peter Neumann, RKA Chief Financial Officer.

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