To test the system, Watson was first tasked with answering questions taken from Doctor’s Dilemma, a competition for trainee doctors that takes place at the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians. Watson was given 188 questions that i…
by Elizabeth Stawicki, Minnesota Public Radio
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Remember Watson, the IBM supercomputer which made headlines last year by trouncing the top two contestants on the TV game show, Jeopardy?
Watson’s million-dollar prize went to charity and now Big Blue is seeking gainful employment for Watson other than as a professional game show contestant.
Today, IBM’s chief medical scientist visited a Minneapolis hospital to talk about how Watson’s artificial intelligence could help doctors wade through loads of research data and apply that knowledge to treating patients.
How Watson can help physicians with diagnosis and treatment
Watson, the “Jeopardy!”-playing computer system, is getting a job.
WellPoint Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. are set to announce a deal on Monday for the health insurer to use the Watson technology, the first time the high-profile project will result in a commercial application.
WellPoint said it plans to use Watson’s data-crunching to help suggest treatment options and diagnoses to doctors. It is part of a far broader push in the health industry to incorporate computerized guidance into care, as doctors and hospitals adopt electronic medical records and other digital tools that can record, track and check their work.
Source: Technology Review
Last week, IBM’s Watson computer beat two human competitors on Jeopardy. Before the contest was even over, IBM and Nuance, a leading maker of voice-recognition software, announced plans to put Watson to work in the health-care industry. The idea is for Watson to digest huge quantities of medical information and deliver useful real-time information to physicians, perhaps eventually in response to voice questions. If successful, the system could help medical experts diagnose conditions or create a treatment plan. But it could prove a far more challenging trick than winning a game show. “The medical domain doubles in knowledge every few years,” said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager of the health-care division of Nuance. “No human brain can possibly retain all the information that’s out there.” Dillione says that while other health-care technology can work with huge pools of data, Watson is the first system capable of usefully harnessing the vast amounts of medical information that exists in the form of natural language text—medical papers, records, and notes. Nuance hopes to roll out the first commercial system based on Watson technology within two years, although it has not said how sophisticated this system will be.
IBM and health-insurance giant Aetna Inc. Thursday introduced a cloud-computing offering that analyzes patient data stored in electronic medical records (EMRs) and administrative data systems and sends updates on treatment progress, drug interactions and best practices to physicians. IBM teamed with Aetna subsidary ActiveHealth Management to create the hosted Collaborative Care Solution product that provides clinical support for physicians, and allows patients to access their own data, without requiring an investment in new infrastructure. The Collabroative Care Solution supports so-called “evidence-based medicine,” expected to become a government requirement in the second-phase of “meaningful use” rules for EMRs.
