IBM's Watson goes to work in Hospital

IBM's Watson goes to work in Hospital
technologyreview.com

Infections and acute illnesses in infants in general are scary for a number of reasons. These guys can go bad very quickly. They can't tell you if and where they hurt, so it's a little like veterinary medicine.

In training, very subtle clues like a slightly elevated heart rate or (in particular) respiratory rate didn't initially alarm me because in adults these kinds of isolated findings mean practically nothing. Very experienced peds nurses would occasionally take a look at a baby I'd just examined and wasn't worried about...and would worry. I learned quickly to trust what seemed like intuition. We'd start the wheels in motion for more vigorous intervention.

These nurses (and the docs who then benefit from their experience) were applying a lot of (sometimes unwritten, if not unconscious) heuristics in these evaluations. A system doing this rigorously, objectively, and routinely is a good application of such software.

The article is about researchers monitoring large streams of data and using machine learning to help in detecting whether an infant in the ICU has an infection. The data streaming tech is from IBM though and based on what was used in Watson, so there is that link.

Interesting work nonetheless and hopefully an echo of things to come. Perhaps those working in the analysis and prediction on massive streams of data part of HFT could reapply their skills here in a way that could literally save lives.