Cleveland Clinic and IBM (News - Alert) recently announced a collaboration to help enhance the use of Watson within the medical training field. IBM's researcher team and clinicians, faculty and medical students of Cleveland Clinic will join hands to optimize Watson’s Deep Question Answering technology capabilities offerings for use in the medicine sector.

In a statement, C. Martin Harris, M.D., CIO of Cleveland Clinic, said that, “Every day, physicians, and scientists around the world add more and more information to what I think of as an ever-expanding, global medical library. Cleveland Clinic's collaboration with IBM is exciting because it offers us the opportunity to teach Watson to 'think' in ways that have the potential to make it a powerful tool in medicine. Technology like this can allow us to leverage that medical library to help train our students and also find new ways to address the public health challenges we face today."

Watson has been designed to quickly analyze human language, its meaning, and the context and then use this information to compile data for answers which can help healthcare decision maker’s un-earth and understand huge volumes of medical information.

The core technology capabilities of Watson have been designed to aid the process of analysis of multiple medical factors to find the most optimal solution for taking care of patients. Medical students can now interface with Watson over the various issues typical to medical cases as a part of the problem-based learning curriculum.

Medical students will also be able to use a collaborative learning and training tool that leverages the Watson technology to help them navigate through numerous hypotheses while locating the best answers, diagnoses, and available treatment options. 

Through their use of Watson’s language and domain analysis capabilities, students will be able to further enhance the tool by assessing and then analyzing the evidence provided by it. The collaboration between the Clinic and IBM will also be looking into the use Watson for processing an electronic medical record (EMR) developed via a comprehensive understanding of EMR content.