On Tuesday, International Business Machines (IBM) announced that Fourteen US and Canadian cancer institutes will use company's Watson computer systems to choose therapies based on a tumor's genetic fingerprints.

Watson has been recognized broadly for beating two champions of the game show Jeopardy! in 2011. It will now sift through thousands of mutations and try to identify which is driving the tumor.

According to IBM, this will be the latest step towards bringing personalized cancer treatments to more patients. Cancer patient care will be transformed by IBM Watson for Oncology.

Oncology is the first specialty where matching therapy to DNA has improved outcomes for some patients. It has also inspired the 'precision medicine initiative', which was announced by President Barack Obama in January.

However, it takes weeks to identify drugs targeting cancer-causing mutations. But Watson, which has the findings of scientific papers and clinical trials on particular cancers and potential therapies in its database, is capable to do it in minutes.

Oncologist Norman Sharpless of the University of North Carolina Lineberger Cancer Center said, "Faced with such a data deluge, 'the solution is going to be Watson or something like it. Humans alone can't do it".

Oncologists will upload the DNA fingerprint of a patient's tumor, which indicates which genes are mutated and are likely possible for malignancy.

Although it is unclear how many patients will be helped by such a 'big data' approach, cancers old-line chemotherapy and radiation will remain the standard of care and genomic analysis.

Steve Harvey, vice president of IBM Watson Health. Cloud-based said that Watson will be used at Cleveland Clinic, Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center in Omaha and Yale Cancer Center by late 2015.