IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
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IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
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Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#2I can't get past the adblocker spam, but I'm going to guess this woman had APL (acute promyelocytic leukemia, caused almost exclusively by a very specific chromosomal translocation) and the doctors didn't think to look for Auer rods and thus did not try FISHing for the translocation. APL is deadly (5% survival) if treated incorrectly but curable (95%) if treated correctly. However, something or other about that differential has been a standard question on the hematology medical boards for, what, 3 decades now?
John Welch, Rick Wilson, Tim Ley and colleagues showed how to do this several years ago: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=897152
I'm curious whether this case was confounded by cytogenetic complexity, which was part of the problem in that case. Ley later diagnosed Lukas Wartman, a fellow in his lab (or, more like, they worked together to figure out what to do), too:
http://oncology.wustl.edu/people/faculty/Wartman/Wartman_Bio...
Lukas did not look nearly as healthy as he does in that picture when I saw him last. He is a great scientist and what he had (adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL) is a nasty malignancy to treat. Children with ALL tend to do well, but their disease typically seems to arise from different underlying causes than adults, who do poorly.
(Not-so-ninja edit: Here is Lukas' own writeup of his experience. He was in a much tighter spot than I recalled: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4850894/ Even children in second relapse are viewed as bad news. Adults in second relapse are generally considered dead men walking. Anyways, read the paper if you're curious.)
If Watson caught that the woman had (say) Ph+-like ALL and suggested the right TKI, that will impress me quite a bit, because I've seen someone die from a wrong guess on the latter. On the other hand, if it was APL, they fucked up the differential somehow and are probably kicking themselves.
(Double not-so-ninja edit: It wasn't APL-vs-AML, or ALL subtyping. Another poster kindly pointed out the primary source for this news, and something doesn't add up.shrug)
Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#3IBM's Watson scares me primarily because the source and data is not in the public domain. Something this powerful, and this rare should be given to humanity to better it.
That said, I'm unsure how doing something like that would provide the right incentives for the research needed to create the next breakthrough.
Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#4IBM's Watson scares me primarily because the source and data is not in the public domain. Something this powerful, and this rare should be given to humanity to better it. That said, I'm unsure how doing something like that would provide the right incentives for the research needed to create the next breakthrough.
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Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#5IBM's Watson scares me primarily because the source and data is not in the public domain. Something this powerful, and this rare should be given to humanity to better it. That said, I'm unsure how doing something like that would provide the right incentives for the research needed to create the next breakthrough.
I'd say that is exactly why this matters... more automation would let the doctors do more research into new treatments, and let computers run the day to day algorithms (Symptom A gets Test B, followed by results C, which is labelled as diagnosis D, and treatment E.)
Having had years of struggle to get a diagnosis on my own problems, the most frustrating part of it all is that exact process, where you are just plugged into the machinery of our health care system, and run through to get a canned answer that needed no human judgment at all, just canned knowledge and a prescribed treatment plan.
So just my own opinion, but yes, please let us automate that portion of medicine, so the doctors can do more research and improve things.
Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#6I can't get past the adblocker spam, but I'm going to guess this woman had APL (acute promyelocytic leukemia, caused almost exclusively by a very specific chromosomal translocation) and the doctors didn't think to look for Auer rods and thus did not try FISHing for the translocation. APL is deadly (5% survival) if treated incorrectly but curable (95%) if treated correctly. However, something or other about that diffe…
It would definitely be impressive, but it doesn't mean much without knowing how many times it mis-diagnosed. IBM is very good at PR and Watson is milked for every little bit so I'm always a bit suspicious about it in triumphant announcements like these.
After all, winning the lottery is a lot less impressive if you've bought a few million tickets and this article says absolutely nothing about any kind of controls or whether or not this was a one-off performance or if it would work at scale.
Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#7IBM's Watson scares me primarily because the source and data is not in the public domain. Something this powerful, and this rare should be given to humanity to better it. That said, I'm unsure how doing something like that would provide the right incentives for the research needed to create the next breakthrough.
As a research scientist at a face recognition company, Watson doesn't strike me as particularly powerful or rare. As mentioned in one of the other comments, IBM PR is pretty impressive though.
Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#8IBM's Watson scares me primarily because the source and data is not in the public domain. Something this powerful, and this rare should be given to humanity to better it. That said, I'm unsure how doing something like that would provide the right incentives for the research needed to create the next breakthrough.
Watson is hyped by the media.
Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#9IBM's Watson scares me primarily because the source and data is not in the public domain. Something this powerful, and this rare should be given to humanity to better it. That said, I'm unsure how doing something like that would provide the right incentives for the research needed to create the next breakthrough.
As a research scientist at a face recognition company, Watson doesn't strike me as particularly powerful or rare. As mentioned in one of the other comments, IBM PR is pretty impressive though.
A good example of Dunning Kruger syndrome.
-- someone in NLP
Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia
#10IBM's Watson scares me primarily because the source and data is not in the public domain. Something this powerful, and this rare should be given to humanity to better it. That said, I'm unsure how doing something like that would provide the right incentives for the research needed to create the next breakthrough.
1. It is most likely that Watson is far less powerful than advertised. Given enough trials, a pigeon could probably detect some forms of cancer that a human expert can't. [1]
2. I too would prefer that more open-source work (and published research) would come out of Watson project than it has been the case so far. However, there's a devil's advocate point to be made that closedness encourages diversity of approaches and implementations. When a high-profile project becomes open-source (as recently happened with TensorFlow), it exerts a lot of pull on time/attention of other developers and researchers that could have been focused on trying out entirely different approaches.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/using-pigeons-to-d...