IBM splashes a BEEELLLLION dollars on med pics biz

IBM is splashing $1bn (£644m) to buy medical image handling and processing biz Merge, part of plans to beef up its Watson Health division unveiled in April. In January, Big Blue formally wheeled out Jeopardy! contestant Watson from storage and opened its IBM Watson unit, intended to commercialise cloud-based cognitive …

[PhilipN]

"It may be worth every penny should IBM ... " blah blah blah

Is that or is that not called the bleeding obvious?

Analysts get paid for this, and journalists get paid for repeating such tripe?

[Ken 16]

All your base

OK, IBM are buying up everyone's personal data and Google are making PC's and Operating Systems.

The end times are approaching (for somebody)

[Ian Michael Gumby]

Meh!

So... there's this thing called CAD (Computer Aided Diagnosis) that's been around for *years*.

For a radiologist, mammography is the toughest film to read. (Yes I know its digital)

So there's a system that has been around to do image processing to help spot things that a Radiologist might miss.

Since the number of images in a study, even if it took 3-4 minutes to review an image, the overall time would be less than it took to take the images.

With respect to an MRI, you have multiple slices and the tech takes a handful of the slices and sends them off to the radiologist to review. Many more images.

Here, you could use Big Data to do the image processing in parallel.

Again, its not a stretch and nothing really new.

The difference is that these images are less complex to read than a mammography so that the need for a CAD system isn't really necessary. So why spend millions of dollars on a cluster and software to review studies that don't need a CAD review in the first place?

Again its IBM trying to find a problem for their solution.