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

forbes.com

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

#51

Post by lucidrains »

ScottBurson wrote: post #44

Watson doesn’t tell a doctor what to do, it provides several options with degrees of confidence for each, along with the supporting evidence it used to arrive at the optimal treatment. That is, of course, as it should be (except for the comma splice, heh), but I think there's a grave danger of doctors becoming complacent about it over time and just doing what Watson recommends. I think we need to make sure that "I di…

well, part of shifting the liability to machines is also beneficial. in a machine, u can find the fault and fix it, improving on the system so such a mistake never happens again in the future. as for enforcing reliability in humans, all you can really do is get out your whip and dish out negative reinforcement.

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

#52

Post by ams6110 »

ScottBurson wrote: post #44

Watson doesn’t tell a doctor what to do, it provides several options with degrees of confidence for each, along with the supporting evidence it used to arrive at the optimal treatment. That is, of course, as it should be (except for the comma splice, heh), but I think there's a grave danger of doctors becoming complacent about it over time and just doing what Watson recommends. I think we need to make sure that "I di…

When Watson tells the hypertensive diabetic to stop smoking and lose 100 pounds of weight, is the patient going to be any more likely to do it than when his human doctor tells him the same thing?

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

#53

Post by bgilroy26 »

MoosePlissken wrote: post #36
giardini wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" has a great chapter on human predictions versus those made by forumlas. The superiority of simple forumlas was being demonstrated way back in the 50s (see "Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis And A Review Of The Evidence"). Since then the evidence for statistical rather than intuitive prediction has only become stronger. From "Thinking, Fast and Slow": "Th…

Just to pitch in 2c, I think society's reticence to implement automated decision making has much more to do with how to handle responsibility for mistakes. I think that is ultimately more important to people than picking the decoder with the best success rate.

By distributing responsibility over many doctors (who hail from many medical schools), you make the pain more manageable. The concentrated responsibility that would result from having a single decision system make many many care decisions might be very difficult to stomach.

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

#54

Post by DeepDuh »

MoosePlissken wrote: post #36
giardini wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" has a great chapter on human predictions versus those made by forumlas. The superiority of simple forumlas was being demonstrated way back in the 50s (see "Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis And A Review Of The Evidence"). Since then the evidence for statistical rather than intuitive prediction has only become stronger. From "Thinking, Fast and Slow": "Th…

60% out of 200 studies is not all that good, really. It allows the experts to believe that if they're still in the top 25%, no machine can beat them (I know that this is not exactly what the studies say, but statistics are almost always being misinterpreted, so I do it here too).

The thing is: I expect Watson to perform significantly better than this. If it can beat Jeopardy grandmasters consistantly and if that technology is correctly being reapplied to the medical field, Watson should easily outperform anything we had before.

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

#55

Post by Gatsky »

It's funny that so many resources have been put into training Watson... far more than would ever go into training a medical student...

It has access to medical evidence that is stuck behind pay walls otherwise... it has access to case histories that another clinician learning oncology could never access...

Because of this, in some ways it's irrelevant to compare Watson to the old way of doing things... Of course it's better!

It's a great development in technology... maybe in the end this is the only solution to the general disillusionment with doctors... it's too difficult and inefficient and failure prone to train warm bodies with their own personalities to do medicine. Watson and its ilk are an alternative with a better return on investment, and improving them is therefore easier to incentivize.

A (closed source) triumph for technology... but a failure for education and academia...

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

#56

Post by foobarqux »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #40
visarga wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 malp…

...100K $/year, so he gets access to Watson...only 30K $/year...open source one, which has 10% less accuracy. That would be tragic. Why is a Pareto improvement (everyone being better off than before) tragic?

Can't we reasonably argue that there is a psychological, emotional or social cost in having some people much worse off than others?

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

#57

Post by lutusp »

foobarqux wrote: post #56
yummyfajitas wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...100K $/year, so he gets access to Watson...only 30K $/year...open source one, which has 10% less accuracy. That would be tragic. Why is a Pareto improvement (everyone being better off than before) tragic?

Can't we reasonably argue that there is a psychological, emotional or social cost in having some people much worse off than others?

Certainly, but that's not the difficulty. The difficulty is not in stating the problem, but imagining trying to solve it.

Problem: some will suffer emotionally and psychologically by being underemployed or unemployed.

Solution: There isn't one. Welcome to reality.

At one extreme, we have a negative utopia run by a techno-elite that designs, builds and installs an army of robots to relieve everyone of dull, repetitive, boring jobs, and thereby produces an unequal distribution of wealth even more extreme than what is true at present.

At the other, we have another negative utopia in which no on goes wanting, resources are distributed according to Marxist ideals (from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs). I think the second has already been tried, and failed, and I don't think the automation of labor will change the outcome.

Between the negative utopias, we have some version of reality, without the ability or the will to force any extreme solution onto the public. We'll just muddle along and adjust to the future, to the degree that we can foresee, and deal with, its effects.

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

#58

Post by rtkwe »

mkr-hn wrote: post #39
rtkwe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than a search engine it aggregates the information from say 10 different studies or cases about a disease into a set of information which it then compares against the current case the doctor is looking at. At that point it posits some diagnoses or some treatments. Calling it a search engine is pretty dismissive.

Have you used Google recently?

For all the grand magic that Google works behind the scenes it falls pretty short of the work that Watson does.

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

#59

Post by lucidrains »

carbocation wrote: post #12
cfn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

another secret in medicine is that a lot of what patients come in for end up to be self-limiting anyhow; the patients just gets better on their own. in these cases, there may be misdiagnosis in there somewhere, but nobody would really care.

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

#60

Post by xyzzy123 »

ScottBurson wrote: post #44

Watson doesn’t tell a doctor what to do, it provides several options with degrees of confidence for each, along with the supporting evidence it used to arrive at the optimal treatment. That is, of course, as it should be (except for the comma splice, heh), but I think there's a grave danger of doctors becoming complacent about it over time and just doing what Watson recommends. I think we need to make sure that "I di…

OK, let me try scary scenario.

According to the video, Watson is relying on a bunch of textbooks, guidelines, journal articles, clinical trials etc.

What happens when drug companies SEO Watson's data sources to get their products or test procedures recommended?

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