Beyond that, there were a number of issues that were not “specific violations of policy or standard procedures but could be perceived as inappropriate or lacking in transparency.”

These included:

• Only one of seven OEA-related service agreements reviewed ($18.75 million, or 27 percent of contract fees) was procured through a competitive process.


• Procurement contracts and expenditures were not processed and reported in a consistent and transparent manner.


• Fees were consistently set just below the amount that would have required board approval.


• Many vendor invoices were not paid timely.


• Gift funds used in support of the OEA project have a deficit balance of $11.59 million as of August 31, 2016, meaning that MD Anderson spent gift monies it has not yet received from donors.

IBM ended support for the project in 2016, according to news site The Register, which pointed out that “it may not be used for treatment except in test and evaluation cases. To restart the project, the center would also have to integrate it with a new medical records system that MD Anderson implemented.”

Despite this major setback, Watson for Oncology has been positively viewed by others, and was defended by IBM. “The OEA R&D project was a success, and likely could have been deployed had MD Anderson chosen to take it forward,” an IBM spokesperson told Forbes.

Backing this up was a study from India, presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in San Antonio in December, 2016, that suggested that the software system is catching up with human doctors in accuracy.

“Manipal Hospitals recently adopted Watson for Oncology as a tool to support our oncologists in making quality, evidence-based decisions for their patients,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. S.P. Somashekhar, chairman of the Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Center of Manipal Hospitals, in Bengaluru, India.

The study reviewed a total of 638 breast cancer patients, and compared the AI system's results with the determinations of the 12-15 oncologists making up the institution's multidisciplinary tumor board.

WFO analyzed the cases and came up with three recommendations – standard treatment (REC); for consideration (FC); and not recommended (NREC).

The study found that the oncologists agreed with WFO about REC and FC recommendations 90 percent of the time.

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