International Business Machines Corp. has been known for its variety of work outside its core area of business. Now, the American multinational technology has planned to shift from helping hospitals run smoothly to lending a hand in the examination room.

It has been said that IBM with its move aims to put artificial intelligence into use in medicine. The Merge Healthcare Inc. which sells system that help doctors store and access medical images has 30 billion images, including X-rays, computerized tomography, and magnetic-resonance-imaging scans as its crown jewels.

IBM is aiming to train its Watson software to identify ailments such as cancer and heart disease. Through the resulting services, it hopes, doctors could get help in diagnosing and treating patients more effectively and efficiently.

Presently, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc.’s Flickr unit and others use similar software to identify objects in photos. But according to IBM, the same technology can identify tumors and other signs of diseases.The nascent effort could help IBM capture a larger slice of the $7.2 trillion spent world-wide annually on health care.

IBM’s deal also could reshape the $3 billion market for archiving medical images and breathing life into companies devoted to computer-driven interpretation of images. It highlights the value of such imagery, which is shared by hospitals for research purposes, as the software technique known as deep learning becomes more prevalent in medicine.

Deep learning, a technique in which software learns to identify patterns by sifting through large amounts of data, has proved successful at interpreting photographs, improving voice recognition in smartphones and detecting fraud in financial transactions.

John Eng, an associate professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins University, said, “In medical data, there’s lots of ambiguity and lots of fuzziness. It’s kind of messy data, and I think that’s going to be a limiting factor with what IBM does with Watson”.