SAN ANTONIO – Every day, practicing oncologists sort through mountains of data from treatment guidelines, clinical trials, protocols, and algorithms to make the best possible therapeutic decisions for their patients.
At Manipal Hospitals in Bangalore, India, those decisions are informed with the aid of Watson for Oncology (WFO), a software platform developed by IBM in concert with clinicians and investigators at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
In this video interview at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, S.P. Somashekhar, MBBS, MS, MCH, chairman of the Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses how the system is used by the members of the center’s multidisciplinary tumor board to inform decision making. He also describes results of a study he presented at the symposium that shows a relatively high degree of concordance between clinician and WFO choices in the treatment of patients with local breast cancer but less agreement when it comes to the management of metastatic disease, for which there is no universal standard of care.