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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

#11

Post by apathy »

jacquesm wrote: post #6
apathy wrote: post #2

I 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…

Well, to play devil's advocate, if all the tickets are free, and the attending gets to ignore all the ones that don't win, that could be useful.

FWIW, here's Lukas' writeup of his experience.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4850894/

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#12

Post by teej »

apathy wrote: post #2

I 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…

The primary source as far as I can tell is this? http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20160804/k10010621901000.htm.... Somewhere elsewhere said that the article says that Watson diagnosed her with "secondary leukemia".

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#13

Post by airplane »

Somewhat interesting and related is that software that performs medical diagnoses better than doctors has existed since the 1970s (Mycin, an expert system). It seems like nowadays that this kind of solution can possibly be provided at scale at a consumer level (can process new medical knowledge by itself, be installed on commodity hardware), not an expert myself though so I don't know if totally true. What exciting times though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin

"it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria."

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#14

Post by apathy »

teej wrote: post #12
apathy wrote: post #2

I 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…

The primary source as far as I can tell is this? http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20160804/k10010621901000.htm... . Somewhere elsewhere said that the article says that Watson diagnosed her with "secondary leukemia".

Very odd. To my knowledge, STAG2 deletions or mutations don't respond any differently to most other primary or secondary AMLs. (In fact, usually a secondary AML is a worse diagnosis as it means they have progressed from something like MDS, which itself has a shitty prognosis). Something is not quite right here.

One possibility is that Seishi Ogawa's group has figured out that something off-label can more effectively treat cohesin mutants and it is under review. But I'm not sure how Watson would have known about that. Interesting.

Probably my reading is flawed, but this doesn't make sense.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#15

Post by nickpsecurity »

oh_wow wrote: post #3

IBM'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.

We have DeepDive. It's a start at a FOSS alternative.

http://deepdive.stanford.edu/

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#16

Post by coldtea »

oh_wow wrote: post #3

IBM'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.

>Something this powerful

You'd be surprised. Watson is nothing to write home about, it's an umbrella term for various disparate technologies (the chess version is not the same as the Jeopardy version, etc) and most of them are not that impressive in the first place.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#17

Post by bitmapbrother »

jacquesm wrote: post #6
apathy wrote: post #2

I 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…

That's pretty cynical of you. Perhaps you should give credit where credit is due instead of attributing it to just PR. Watson diagnosed an illness that was undetected by her doctors. This happens all of the time and people die because of this or live in misery because of it. If Watson can prevent even a fraction of the rampant misdiagnoses and aid in the actual determination of the illness then it's in our benefit to use the information it provides.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#18

Post by bitmapbrother »

etangent wrote: post #10
oh_wow wrote: post #3

IBM'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…

Of course, just like monkeys picking stocks with darts can outperform the best traders on Wall street.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#19

Post by smallnamespace »

apathy wrote: post #11
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, to play devil's advocate, if all the tickets are free, and the attending gets to ignore all the ones that don't win, that could be useful. FWIW, here's Lukas' writeup of his experience. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4850894/

> if all the tickets are free

They're definitely not free; doctors have to evaluate what Watson says, and if Watson is wrong a significant fraction of the time, then doctors will spend a lot of time and energy barking up the wrong tree.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#20

Post by rdtsc »

It is funny that so many are quick to dismiss this because it is IBM, so "it must be just PR" (saw a few comments here). If Google did this or Elon Musk, everyone would be singing praises and musing about a better, brighter future.

Which is funny because it is Google / Facebook / Microsoft which collect and hold everyone's personal details and data. For better or for worse, IBM never seemed to have gotten into that business (yet?) of recording and selling every American's data for ads.

In general, I think healthcare is more important than self-driving Teslas or robots making us dinner and scratching our backs. So at least they seem to have focused on the right thing.

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