By Park Hyong-ki
Gachon University Gil Medical Center in Incheon said Friday that it is postponing the adoption of IBM Watson for Oncology due to the ongoing construction of the interior of its hospital space exclusively for the supercomputer.
"The construction of the space for Watson for Oncology is running longer than expected. Due to this delay, we have pushed back the adoption of the artificial intelligence (AI) to November," the hospital spokesperson said.
At the time of its signing ceremony with IBM last month, Gil Medical Center projected that it could have the AI system ready for cancer patients by mid-October, or around the 17th.
Then, the hospital garnered a lot of public attention and recognition for being the country's first hospital to adopt the supercomputer in the health care industry.
Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare even noted that there were no regulatory hurdles for the hospital in using it for its patients.
The hospital said that it is currently training its doctors and staff on the machine learning technology.
IBM Watson for Oncology, which is used in countries such as the United States, China and India, analyzes medical data, records, and academic and research journals to provide best possible treatment recommendations and options to doctors for patients with such serious disorders as lung and breast cancers.
"The AI only provides guidelines by analyzing mountains of data, sort of like a navigation system that gives options on which path to take. The final decision on how to treat the patients is ultimately made by doctors," the spokesperson said.
Machine learning has been gaining attention as one of the most promising technologies that will be used in the new digital age for speedier data analyses.
In Korea, it emerged into the spotlight during a Go match between Google's AlphaGo and player Lee Se-dol.
IBM Watson for Oncology is capable of analyzing data equivalent to reading 1 million books in a second as the supercomputer contains information from over 300 medical journals and 200 textbooks.
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