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IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

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Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#11
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blindly trusting your doctor is dangerous, yet most people do.

I suppose very few doctors have way less than 90% accuracy and, on top of that, Watson is not sensitive to external factors. This is a fantastic tool and may end up changing the way we interface with the health care system.

As a doctor I agree.

At medical school you learn to develop algorithms to deal with inputs and act upon the output.

Out of medical school you are meant to keep up to date with countless updates in clinical practice based on mountains of studies and publications. Plenty of data is not distributed.

This is a great step forward for medicine.

Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#12
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blindly trusting your doctor is dangerous, yet most people do.

I suppose very few doctors have way less than 90% accuracy and, on top of that, Watson is not sensitive to external factors. This is a fantastic tool and may end up changing the way we interface with the health care system.

> I suppose very few doctors have way less than 90% accuracy

It's a reasonable thought. When this has been studied at autopsy, however, doctors seem to be right 70-85% of the time (higher when very confident of the diagnosis) [1]. There are a bunch of studies that show this, and you can find many in the linked meta-analysis.

Of course, this focuses on things that can lead to death. If your doctor misdiagnosis RSV as metapneumovirus, you'll survive either way in all likelihood, so for some diseases we'll probably never know the true diagnostic accuracy.

[1] = http://www.pathkids.com/autopsy/hasleton%20on%20discrepancie...

Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#13
post #4

Why I have the eerie feeling that this sort of thing might be very dangerous? I mean, what happen if too much people start to rely only on this, and then it is used to mislead (WWII battle of beams style) or what happen if people start to become dependant on it, and you have a power failure? For example a massive solar storm might happen in our lifetime, the last time it happened (about 150 years ago) it made telegra…

In your scenario there will be so many other major problems that slower healthcare diagnoses will not be much of a factor. Most medical equipment would also be unusable so even if you know what is wrong you would be unable to do anything about it.

You could make the same case against Google and yet it has proven to be a huge boon.

Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#14
post #4

Why I have the eerie feeling that this sort of thing might be very dangerous? I mean, what happen if too much people start to rely only on this, and then it is used to mislead (WWII battle of beams style) or what happen if people start to become dependant on it, and you have a power failure? For example a massive solar storm might happen in our lifetime, the last time it happened (about 150 years ago) it made telegra…

This product is essentially a search engine. Doctors refer to medical texts all of time, this IBM tool is simply making it easier (and faster) to access the right information using plain English queries. It's not like we're going to replace doctors with computer kiosks...well, at least not until they work out some of the bugs.

Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#15
This is truly impressive. The only part that I'm unsure about it is when they say they "WellPoint will be using the system [to help] health insurers determine which treatments are fair, appropriate and efficient and, in turn, what it will cover", the possibility for abuse their is significant.

Anyway, congrats to anyone at IBM who worked on this, when you make the future so great it feels natural, you're doing it right.

Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#17
post #3
post #2

People don't seem to realize how huge this is. This venture could easily turn out to be the most profitable in IBM's history, and one of the most important inventions in health care.

I agree - this seems like a turning point in health care. granted, in five years most people will still get their medical advice from a person - but I wonder for how much longer after that.

I am extremely happy about Watson, but I need to point out some possibilities:

Imagine this scenario. John earns 100K $/year, so he gets access to Watson. Jerry earns only 30K $/year, so he can only use the open source one, which has 10% less accuracy. That would be tragic.

Another scenario: doctor X sees the Watson prediction, and has a doubt about them. He doesn't say anything for fear he could be charged with malpractice if the patient dies under his different treatment. Thus, doctor X is reduced to a yes man, and his boss is not even another man, but an artificial brain. How many doctors would dare oppose Watson ? Do we need doctors any more if all they do is rubber stamp Watson's results? What about medical students - if they know that the difference in diagnosis accuracy between a medium and a top student has been reduced to just 2-3%, why strive to learn more than the other? After all, it's the same whether you are in the top 1% or around the middle of your class.

Ok, now for a positive scenario: we get cell phones with biometric sensors (medical tricorder) and we can input our symptoms. We are trained to do that because we took a 3 month medical class while in high-school. It was compulsory. So, now we can treat 80-90% of our problems without going into a doctor's office. This is amazing especially for remote areas and places where there is no access to doctors for hundreds of miles.

Africa would be revolutionized by it. A single medical nurse with a cell phone / mobile lab could service many people.

Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#18
On one hand it's impressive and huge and through that is somewhat intimidating and scary, because it makes one feel like losing control (to the "machines").

On the other hand it's a straight-forward extension of a basic calculator. There are tasks that humans can do, but not as fast, so why not automate them? It doesn't mean that no one can subtract and divide by hand, it just makes one's work more efficient. Similarly, Watson doesn't mean that next generation doctors will be lazy incompetent asses at mercy of a powerful computer system. It means that they will have yet another instrument to help them do their job better.

Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#19
post #2

People don't seem to realize how huge this is. This venture could easily turn out to be the most profitable in IBM's history, and one of the most important inventions in health care.

Preach on. I'm baffled by how techies can be so underwhelmed by what IBM is doing.

Such software has been available for decades, been shown to be superior to human diagnosis, and yet has not been accepted by the medical community. Doctors will likely continue to push back. It may require restructuring of the medical education community (perhaps a' la the movie Idiocracy) to bring about utilization.

"50 years of successful predictive modeling should be enough: Lessons for philosophy of science (2002)"

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.217....

Idiocracy, the movie

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

Re: IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

#20
This initial rollout is not intended to be used by doctors to determine (or even suggest) treatments for patients. IBM is usually very careful to point this out: they are not looking to replace doctors, at least not yet.

(Source: work for a company that has worked with IBM on this)

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