IBM Corp announced its decision to acquire Merge Healthcare Inc, which is the manufacturer of healthcare imaging equipment, to strengthen its new healthcare venture.

The deal worth $1 billion will enable IBM to develop a combination of data and images developed through Merge Healthcare's medical imaging unit and Watson's cloud-based healthcare computing system.

Under the new system, huge volumes of data will be handled and analyzed. The end product will be of utmost use to doctors and medical professionals in handling the patient information and inventories. The major significance will be in taking a quick look at patient's health history including his family's health history too.

With this, IBM has entered third such a deal in the healthcare IT sector. In April, IBM had launched its Watson Health unit.

"Organically, we will continue to build and invest from a research perspective in core technologies. We will compliment and supplement that with acquisitions," said Stephen Gold, Vice President, IBM Watson.

The new unit will allow IBM access to as many as 7,500 healthcare sites operating from the US. Following the deal's announcement, Merge's shares went up trading at $7.08. The share holders of the company were hopeful of earning $7.13 per share at a premium of 31.8 percent, the company officials stated.

The value of the company's equity portion was stable at $713.1 million.

IBM officials said that the company aims at focusing consistently on the healthcare segment at least over the next one decade to ensure seamless growth.