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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

#51

Post by xbmcuser »

Zigurd wrote: post #22
rdtsc wrote: post #20

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 b…

You would see many of the same comments no matter who claimed some kind of first in medical diagnosis. Expert systems have been coming up with diagnoses doctors missed for decades. It's a fat target for automation because much of the expertise is available in diagnostic protocols and few humans can hold all that information in their heads and keep it up to date. MYCIN only used a few hundred rules and it could keep t…

Yeah I do think the large data sets and processing power available to systems like Watson and Deepmind etc can and should improve detection of many diseases. More than 100k people die in the us alone due to hospital mistakes. 12million misdiagnosed a year is huge number

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#52

Post by Noseshine »

will_brown wrote: post #25
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…

>nothing about any kind of controls or whether or not this was a one-off performance or if it would work at scale. I thought the 20 million oncology studies Watson cross referenced was the control and I arrived at the opposite conclusion as you about the usefulness at scale. For example, I immediately thought that under the Affordable Care Act, the number of patient Electronic Health Records the Government collects e…

The "control" for the actual (machine) learning may be the test set derived from the available data, but the control of a medical study must be real life (new data) and not old data used for the machine learning algorithm.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#53

Post by jacquesm »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #44
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…

> After all, winning the lottery is a lot less impressive if you've bought a few million tickets I don't know, I'd still be impressed, wouldn't you? Buying a few million lottery tickets is impressive by itself, both logistically and financially. And even still, odds. It's a lot of risk for anybody to dangle. Shit, buying every ticket is even more impressive. (I grant your point, you just posed a funny metaphor as com…

I don't think buying every ticket is more impressive, it is pretty much the definition of a losing strategy.

Tests like these are all about the statistics and without statistics this result - while important to this particular individual - is almost meaningless.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#54

Post by jacquesm »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #29
sk5t wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't cynical to insist on knowing the test's sensitivity and selectivity.

It's one thing to ask for additional information on how the test was conducted and another to automatically attribute it to a PR play that IBM likes to "milk every last drop of". That's cynical.

> to automatically attribute it to a PR play that IBM likes to "milk every last drop of".

No, that's history. IBM has quite a series of Watson 'breakthroughs' that ultimately went nowhere, to the point where when I see 'Watson' mentioned in an IBM press release it automatically gets discounted if there isn't a part where the subject has some statistics to go with the inevitable hype.

I see it as IBM trying to stay relevant in a world that needs it less and less and that's why they focus on anything that will grab headlines.

Winning jeopardy, curing cancer, what's not to like about IBM?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GaC_y_3...

Cached link supplied because the original has departed.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#55

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> The technology is certainly there for the eventual creation of an AI version of House

"The technology" has "certainly been there" since at least 1970, with software like MYCIN:

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

MYCIN was an early expert system that used artificial intelligence to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics

It and its ilk (expert systems, with hand-crafted rules) (it was the '70s) where commonly shown to outperform experts:

MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that 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.

Yet, we still don't have (flying cars) AI that can help doctors make better diagnoses- and note I'm by no means advocating replacing the experts with AI. That would open a whole other can of worms (what do you train your AI on when there's no more experts, because you replaced them all with AI?).

But- just having the tech doesn't auto-solve your problems as if by magic. You gotta beat dumb politics first.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#57

Post by frik »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #15
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/

It works in a rather different way under the hood, right?

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#58

Post by robinduckett »

rdtsc wrote: post #20

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 b…

> 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

I think they learnt their lesson on this particular issue shortly after the holocaust.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#59

Post by nickpsecurity »

frik wrote: post #57
nickpsecurity wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have DeepDive. It's a start at a FOSS alternative. http://deepdive.stanford.edu/

It works in a rather different way under the hood, right?

I'd assume it being a clean-slate development. Apache project has one that's shared with Watson. I just liked this one.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#60

Post by TillE »

seesomesense wrote: post #36

Without more information, it is difficult to know if this is just another Theranos.

It's not difficult to see how a computer - especially with a huge database - could do very well at differential diagnosis. It would require the correct inputs, but its advantages are very clear even with fairly simple algorithms.

Theranos hand-waved several huge problems with their approach by claiming proprietary magic. What they tried to do is probably impossible. So, big difference.

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