Just Months After Jeopardy!, Watson Wows Doctors

kkleiner writes "Following its resounding victory on Jeopardy!, IBM's Watson has been working hard to learn as much about medicine as it can with a steady diet of medical textbooks and healthcare journals. In a recent demonstration to the Associated Press, Watson showed a promising ability to diagnose patients. The demonstration was a success, and it is the hope of IBM and many medical professionals that in the coming years Watson will lend doctors a helping hand as they perform their daily rounds."

Better he use Google than watch House M.D.

[crovira]

That dweeb will almost kill you twice or three times with misdiagnoses before he finds the right one.

We don't need no stinkin' AI!

[Shauni]

Just bring us into the 21st century, for the love of FSM! Modern healthcare is not a doctor proscribing a treatment anymore... it's a network of specialists making recommendations and sharing data with each other. However, this "sharing" more often than not goes at pre-Internet speeds. Delays of days or even weeks are common as multiple opinions are sought, insurance companies are contacted, enormous paper portfolio are passed around, one for each facility... it's a real mess. It's not "doctoring" that keeps them busy; it's bureaucracy. It's reading test results off of carbon paper forms and waiting to see if their patient can even afford the "gold standard" treatment they want to give them (even if they're insured!)

Watson can't deal with any of that, really. And that ignores the danger bureaucratic errors can pose to an AI, such as test results that are inexplicably attributed to the wrong patient... what happens when Watson makes a crap diagnosis because of bad data? Can he eliminate bad data or even "show his work?"

Re:Ten years ago on my Palm Pilot

[maztuhblastah]

Do you think they do plastic surgery because it cures people? Do you think they are treating ulcers with tagamet instead of antibiotics because the antibiotics would cure you fast?

I was starting to listen to what you were saying until I read this.

The current standard treatment for Helicobacter Pylori is a triple-therapy regime which does indeed include antibiotics. It is highly effective and usually results in eradication.

Cimetidine hasn't been used as a treatment for ulcers in since the discovery of H. Pylori, many years ago. Considering that there are a number of modern antibiotics that are active against H. Pylori it is quite rare for a patient to not receive some antibiotic cocktail -- and even if there were a patient who (for some reason) could not receive *any* antibiotics, PPIs would almost certainly be used in place of cimetidine.

I'm sorry you have such a vendetta against physicians. Perhaps your views will change with age. I know that mine certainly did as I entered adulthood.

Re:Better job than humans

[CycleMan]

I wonder if, 25 years after this, "the excellent doctors will still be excellent"? There will always be a range of ability levels, but how will the range change with this? One thing I've heard from my pilot friends is that the commercial airline industry used to be able to rely on very good pilots coming out of the military and taking civilian jobs flying big jetliners. Since the average number of hours of flying time for a commercial airline pilot was high, the pilots were very capable in handling unusual situations. Now that fewer ex-military pilots are being created, commercial airlines are pulling from other places and getting less-qualified individuals as a result, and their relative lack of flight time is cited as a factor in some incidents. So the likelihood of "excellent" pilots is decreasing, due to the declining caliber of the collective pool of pilots from which to draw excellent ones. I can't demonstrate conclusively that this is analogous to the situation we will experience in medicine with increased computerized diagnostics but I think it is an important question to work through.