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IBM Is Counting on Its Bet on Watson, and Paying Big Money for It

Ysabelle-S

Highly Vexatious
Messages
524
This looks interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t...-watson-and-paying-big-money-for-it.html?_r=0

At the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Watson was tested on 1,000 cancer diagnoses made by human experts. In 99 percent of them, Watson recommended the same treatment as the oncologists.

In 30 percent of the cases, Watson also found a treatment option the human doctors missed. Some treatments were based on research papers that the doctors had not read — more than 160,000 cancer research papers are published a year. Other treatment options might have surfaced in a new clinical trial the oncologists had not yet seen announced on the web.

But Watson read it all. “Humans enabled by A.I. is the way to go with genomics,” said Dr. Norman E. Sharpless, head of the school’s cancer center.
 
Messages
2,087
You'd wonder if the doctors just did a Google search would they have found the same thing ?

cbsnews said:
The treatments identified by Watson were in clinical trial or had only become approved or revealed recently.

Sounds like the doctors just didn't know about some new or possibly new treatments.
Is it more a poor reflection on the doctors than about how amazing Watson is ?
 

CFS_for_19_years

Hoarder of biscuits
Messages
2,396
Location
USA
You'd wonder if the doctors just did a Google search would they have found the same thing ?

Sounds like the doctors just didn't know about some new or possibly new treatments.
Is it more a poor reflection on the doctors than about how amazing Watson is ?

I watched the TV broadcast so I arrived at a good understanding of it. Watson is able to sift through thousands of scientific articles and find the best treatment for an individual patient. No doctor on earth has that sort of time. If you watched the video I think you'd come to the same conclusion that it is at the very least a valuable data mining instrument. If I had cancer I'd want to see what it could find.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/artificial-intelligence-making-a-difference-in-cancer-care/

The…more exciting part about [the analysis] is in 30 percent of patients, Watson found something new—so that’s 300-plus people where Watson identified a treatment that a well-meaning, hard-working group of physicians hadn’t found,” says Sharpless, head of the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The treatments identified by Watson were in clinical trial or had only become approved or revealed recently. “These were real…things…we would have considered actionable had we known about it at the time of the diagnosis,” says Dr. Sharpless.

Watson had been trained to read medical literature. It read 25 million published medical papers in about week and was also able to scan the Web for the latest scientific research. As an artificial intelligence, Watson can understand and analyze natural language, continuously learns and never forgets.
 
Messages
3,263
Hmmm, sounds like a first pass search only. I suspect it can't really tell good research from bad? Or even if it can do that a bit (e.g., look for key phrases like RCT etc.), it wouldn't have a very nuanced view. I also wonder how many of the "new treatments" it found not mentioned by doctors were things like reiki therapy?

Perhaps it could be really useful if you could teach it the kinds of biases its likely to encounter in the information it processes. Maybe.
 
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1

Ysabelle I thought the same thing! I heard about the 60 Minutes segment on Watson and cancer then earlier this week CBS This Morning interviewed IBM CEO GInni Rometty about Watson and it's potential in medicine. It would be amazing to have ME/CFS research synthesized by Watson. I think the potential to identify promising research patterns sort out sub-types, link research and researchers, and more would facilitate progress on cause and treatment (and perhaps cure) of this disease tremendously!