At any given time, patients at the Mayo Clinic, headquartered in Rochester, Minnesota, are participating in 8, 000 clinical trials. Beginning next year the process of matching patients to appropriate trials—currently done manually—will be taken over by Watson, IBM.s supercomputer. The plan is for Watson to take over much of the work of comparing a patient’s characteristics to the inclusion/exclusion criteria for recruiting participants in clinical trials.
IBM’s Watson Supercomputer Improves Clinical Studies at Mayo
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Mayo Clinic’s goal is to double the proportion of patients that take part in clinical research and bring the number up to 10%, according to Nick Paul Taylor, writing in FierceBiotechIT. “Using Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities, Mayo Clinic can consistently offer more cutting-edge medical options to patients and conclude trials faster, ” IBM SVP Mike Rhodin said in a statement.
Taylor wrote that IBM is designing a version of Watson specifically for the needs of Mayo Clinic. The process involves adding details of all the clinical trials underway at Mayo Clinic—plus those on ClinicalTrials.gov—to Watson’s library. Watson is also being trained to find matches between the trials in these resources and health records of patients at Mayo Clinic.
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This is a fascinating development. In my practice we've seen similar outcomes with the revised protocol. The key differentiator seems to be patient selection criteria. Has anyone else noticed the correlation with BMI thresholds?
Great point. I'd push back slightly on the conclusion, the sample size in the cited study is too small to draw population-level inferences. That said, the directional signal is compelling and worth a larger RCT.
We implemented a similar approach last year. Early results are promising but we're still gathering 12-month follow-up data. Happy to share our protocol if anyone is interested.
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