PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD | Table of Contents: |
Outsmarting two really smart guys in "Jeopardy!" is pretty impressive. But can IBM's Watson take on deadly serious challengers like cancer and heart disease?
That's the kind of "Deep Question Answering" role that IBM is developing for its natural-language-understanding computer system. The goal is to use the technology to help doctors and other health care professionals arrive at decisions—the right decisions—when diagnosing and treating patients. Watson would essentially act as the smartest guy in the room, a speedy, unflappable "assistant" who could scan the latest medical literature, patient histories, entire data warehouses of scientific research, and any other potentially relevant material to arrive quickly at a diagnosis or remedy.
Part of IBM's reason for building Watson is to help people make sense of huge amounts of data quickly. Few people need to interpret data as often and as quickly as people in the medical profession. The system's 10 racks of Power 750 servers can sort through the equivalent of about 200 million pages of unstructured data and come up with an answer in less than 3 seconds, IBM says.
IBM's Watson is acquiring the tools and smarts to tackle health care issues and theoretically reduce medical errors. (Source: IBM)
Dr. Martin Kohn, director of Watson Healthcare Analytics, IBM Research, explains it this way: "When you think about what Watson does, it goes off and creates lots of different hypotheses and then chooses the one it feels most confident about based on the input—what the patient says the symptoms are—and all the information it has from medical journals, textbooks, newspaper articles, etc. That is basically the same thing as a group of doctors giving opinions and then researching or arguing out the best one.
"When information is constantly changing—when a critical patient suddenly crashes, a fever spikes, blood pressure drops, a patient goes into shock or cardiac arrest—physicians are faced with finding the right answers even when they don't know the right questions to ask," Kohn says. "Each piece of information adds to the equation, making effective decision-making crucial to life or death."
In this type of scenario, Kohn says, Watson can "weigh multiple lines of evidence in real time [as data streams in], applying logic, relying on its own encyclopedic database of knowledge, and assigning a likelihood of correctness to each answer."
Although IBM scientists have been talking for a while about Watson's analytical potential in health care situations, it all sounded slightly hypothetical until IBM announced recently a research deal and two partnerships that should help transform the "Jeopardy" champ into a doctor's assistant.
The research deal with Nuance Communications will bring that company's speech-recognition technology, along with its Clinical Language Understanding software, to Watson's language-processing and analytical capabilities. The combination will essentially turn the system into a machine that understands a human voice speaking clinical terminology: Imagine an ER nurse yelling out a failing patient's symptoms.
The two firms say a commercial implementation will be ready in 18 to 24 months.
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