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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

#71

Post by krona »

amelius wrote: post #62
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…

True, but I think it is sad that IBM uses the Watson name for everything related to AI, because this way they implicitly pretend to have found a unified approach to AI. I don't believe this is true. The AI doing the diagnosing is not the same AI as the one that played Jeopardy. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

As someone who's worked on/with teams building various Watson services/solutions over the past 3 years, I can confirm Watson is almost entirely a branding exercise without (from the engineering perspective) common leadership, coherent inter-team objectives, etc.

There isn't a 'unified approach' to anything here beyond the use of various open source machine learning libraries with huge amounts of medical data either licensed or acquired over the past 2 years.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#72

Post by chae »

epmaybe wrote: post #70

I have a slightly unrelated question, but there may be medically trained individuals in this thread. I'm a medical student, and it seems like most people in the field are rather cavalier when it comes to talking about the job outlook for physicians in most any specialty. Do you all think that some healthcare jobs will not be as vital in the next decade thanks to improvements in computing and AI?

Also a medical student with an interest in AI. Healthcare jobs that rely on visual recognition (dermatology, radiology, some pathology) are probably the most likely to benefit in the short term (see Enlitic). Presumably a lot of other jobs require advances in Natural Language Processing/Understanding, as one of the big problems in health is the mostly unstructured nature of the data.

It is also possible that many healthcare jobs are essentially AI-complete problems - in this scenario, subjective opinion is not really a reliable marker, but lots of AI specialists give around a 90% chance of human-level machine intelligence by 2070 (there's a table in Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence with the actual figures).

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#73

Post by peter303 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #55

>> 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 sy…

Each generation of computer power enables new AI techniques. Expert systems require explicit distillation of "rules". That took a lot of human work. And they are considered brittle when they are outside their expertise. But expert systems could on the million times weaker computers of the 1980s.

Watson employes statistical searching of large knowledge bases. You dont have to explicity ferret out all the rules and relationships. Google Translate does this too. There is no preprogrammed language dictionary.

The next frontier is deep learning which requires powerful computing to operate in real time.

All these techniques have their limitations. No magic bullet yet.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#75

Post by sangnoir »

krona wrote: post #71
amelius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but I think it is sad that IBM uses the Watson name for everything related to AI, because this way they implicitly pretend to have found a unified approach to AI. I don't believe this is true. The AI doing the diagnosing is not the same AI as the one that played Jeopardy. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

As someone who's worked on/with teams building various Watson services/solutions over the past 3 years, I can confirm Watson is almost entirely a branding exercise without (from the engineering perspective) common leadership, coherent inter-team objectives, etc. There isn't a 'unified approach' to anything here beyond the use of various open source machine learning libraries with huge amounts of medical data either l…

Who exactly thinks its a good idea to hijack an existing brand for tangentially related, poorer quality products? Microsoft also does this with Skype and 'Skype' for business. Instead of a win-win scenario they hope for, they instead burn up the goodwill generated by the original product to bear the name. So instead of thinking "Watson, the amazing AI that won Jeorpardy", I now think "Watson, the horrible mishmash of IBM APIs"

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#76

Post by ethbro »

sangnoir wrote: post #75
krona wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's worked on/with teams building various Watson services/solutions over the past 3 years, I can confirm Watson is almost entirely a branding exercise without (from the engineering perspective) common leadership, coherent inter-team objectives, etc. There isn't a 'unified approach' to anything here beyond the use of various open source machine learning libraries with huge amounts of medical data either l…

Who exactly thinks its a good idea to hijack an existing brand for tangentially related, poorer quality products? Microsoft also does this with Skype and 'Skype' for business. Instead of a win-win scenario they hope for, they instead burn up the goodwill generated by the original product to bear the name. So instead of thinking "Watson, the amazing AI that won Jeorpardy", I now think "Watson, the horrible mishmash of…

IBM's primary sales channel is enterprise, where branding makes all the difference. Most of the time, the person authorizing the project has no idea on the technical details (and may or may not have solicited internal technical commentary).

These deals are honestly mostly about trust. Do they trust IBM / {vendor} has the expertise to deliver the project? Given that it's mostly bespoke integration, branding the entire IBM AI/ML area as "Watson" isn't too disingenuous.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#77

Post by apathy »

smallnamespace wrote: post #19
apathy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doctors have to evaluate what patients say, too, and they're forgetful or clueless at least as often as anyone else. If the cost-benefit analysis favors having Watson (or whatever) around, great, if not, great, just another decision to make.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#78

Post by apathy »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #66
Noseshine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need 100% new data to get an idea of performance. It's meaningful (indeed, common) to select some arbitrary percentage of the real-world data as a "training set" then measure the performance of the algorithm on the rest. It's not proof against overfitting, of course, but it helps.

right, but there's a reason we run clinical trials before accepting that something is superior to standard of care. It is really, really hard to manipulate a preregistered clinical trial (not that people don't try) and incredibly easy to manipulate train/test/validate results.

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#79

Post by apathy »

necessity wrote: post #49
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…

I suggest NoScript. All anti-adblock spam and paywalls are javascript.

thanks! It seems obvious now that you point it out, but that's how most good ideas work :-)

Re: IBM Watson correctly diagnoses a form of leukemia

#80

Post by rgoebel »

I see two important parts to this dialog now: 1) machine support for sifting through mountains of data, and 2) the increasing jeopardy of large corporations controlling data. For part 1, the dialog confirms what some of us already know: "Watson" is a branding exercise, and there is no overall coherent plan for strategic AI. But general open source components for literature-based discovery are being built. Part 2 is scarier, and as noted by two speakers from NSF last Friday (Peter Arzberger, Chaitan Baru), "data IS infrastructure," and so the increasing difficulty for public data sources to compete with Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Baidu, etc. is perhaps the more serious challenge for AI support of humans in the future. University research faculty can't tackle problems that require the de novo or nearly de novo creation of such data infrastructure, so we await public policy of funding agencies to clarify the construction and access to such. (Americans in this forum please note that you need to stop writing and thinking as if there is no other part of the planet ... I would be most grateful if Google brokered access to only American data ;-)
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