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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

#31

Post by rtkwe »

booruguru wrote: post #14
speeder wrote: 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.

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.

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

#32

Post by hect0r »

cfn wrote: post #10
tluyben2 wrote: 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.

In general practice, you will find that doctors become less accurate as they get older; whereas in surgery, older doctors generally perform better with less complications. The reason is that the feedback loop in surgery is instant -- you do something wrong, you have to fix immediately -- wheas in general practice, it is often the case that the doctor never even knows of the prescribed treatment worked so the feedback is a lot "weaker". Therefore, I think Watson could be hugely beneficial and counter-balance the biases and decline in skills that plagues many doctors who work in general practice.

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

#33

Post by gwern »

> WellPoint’s chief medical officer Samuel Nussbaum said at the press event today that health care pros make accurate treatment decisions in lung cancer cases only 50% of the time (a shocker to me). Watson, since being trained in this medical specialty, can make accurate decisions 90% of the time.

That sounds very impressive if the number isn't being cooked in some way.

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

#34

Post by rtkwe »

booruguru wrote: post #5
DeepDuh wrote: 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.

Not all of us. I'm graduating this spring and the top of my fucking awesome hire list was the Watson group in SWG @ IBM.

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

#36

Post by MoosePlissken »

giardini wrote: post #19
booruguru wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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":

"The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment. No exception has been convincingly documented."

Also interesting:

"Several studies have shown that human decision makers are inferior to a prediction formula even when they are given the score suggested by the formula! They feel that they can overrule the formula because they have additional information about the case, but they are wrong more often than not."

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

#37

Post by pekk »

visarga wrote: post #17
jcfrei wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 malp…

The parts of Africa which aren't going to the hospital aren't revolutionized by it. And the ones which go to the hospital and pick up an infection aren't revolutionized by it.

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

#38

Post by MoosePlissken »

visarga wrote: post #17
jcfrei wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 malp…

"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?"

From what I've heard, med school is mostly about memorizing huge amounts of information without a whole lot of critical thinking. But that's a task that computers are infinitely better at than humans. Wouldn't it be a good thing if Watson could free med students from rote memorization, allowing them to instead focus on something that humans are actually good at, like research?

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

#39

Post by mkr-hn »

rtkwe wrote: post #31
booruguru wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#40

Post by yummyfajitas »

visarga wrote: post #17
jcfrei wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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?

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