Vertical-specific use cases took on a new importance in the analytics world last week after IBM Corp. announced the acquisition of a medical imaging provider for a billion dollars to augment its Watson-based medical analytics service. The technology it’s gaining through Merge Healthcare Inc. will enable the cloud-based platform to tap the CAT scans, X-rays and the other diagnostic images that together constitute 90 percent of the data in hospitals.

The deal is the culmination of an intense effort to tap that information that has previously seen Big Blue acquire two smaller companies likewise specializing in managing medical files and partner with several more, most notably Johnson & Johnson’s healthcare technology business. The data from Merge, whose software is used at more than 7,500 care facilities in the U.S., will be fused with the assets from the other deals to facilitate unified analysis.

IBM hopes that enabling Watson to examine medical issues from multiple angles will make it possible to automate much of the tedious administrative currently involved in piecing together patient information and free up healthcare professionals to focus on more pressing matters. QASymphony Inc. also took it upon itself to realize that latter goal last week, but for an entirely different audience: developers.

The outfit introduced a tool called qMAP that promises to visualize application test results in a sort of heat map that highlights components with large concentrations of bugs, an approach touted as a simpler alternative to manual bug hunting, which can a major impediment in large projects with a lot of features. That focus on reducing human involvement is starting to carry over to other parts of the analytics lifecycle, too, particularly the data integration phase.

The already tasking chore of aggregating and harmonizing information has become even more difficult in the wake of the explosion of information sources brought up by the rise of connected devices and cloud services, a challenge Microsoft Corp. hopes to address to its Azure Data Factory. The managed integration tool launched last week with the promise of simplifying the process into logical pipelines free of most of the manual input historically involved in the work.

These constructs consist of automated policies for ingesting, transforming and filtering information that can be managed through a straightforward visual interface. Microsoft boasts that the service is already finding use with big names such as Rockwell Automation, Inc., which leverages the functionality to provide predictive maintenance for customers of its industrial equipment.

Photo via Geralt