Watson’s Next Feat? Taking on Cancer
by Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post
Candida Vitale and the other fellows at MD Anderson’s leukemia treatment center had known one another for only a few months, but they already were very tight. The nine of them shared a small office and were always hanging out on weekends. But she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the new guy.
Rumor had it that he had finished med school in two years and had a photographic memory of thousands of journal articles and relevant clinical trials. When the fellows were asked to summarize patients’ records for the senior faculty in the mornings, he always seemed to have the best answers. “I was surprised,” said Vitale, a 31-year-old who received her MD in Italy. “Even if you work all night, it would be impossible to be able to put this much information together like that.” The new guy’s name was a mouthful, so many of his colleagues simply called him by his nickname: Watson.
IBM’s Watson supercomputer is being trained to find personalized cancer treatments by comparing patients’ disease and treatment histories, genetic data, scans, and symptoms against the vast corpus of medical knowledge.
Whereas human specialist teams could take weeks accomplishing this task, Watson can make such recommendations in minutes. The project began with Watson being fed names, ages, genders, medications, lab tests, imaging results, and notes from each visit for thousands of leukemia patients treated at a specific facility over the past few years.
Researchers also selected key journal articles from the past for Watson to reference and started giving it access to newly published content. Watson produces a list of therapy possibilities and rates them according to low, medium, or high confidence.
“I see technology like this as a way to really break free from our current healthcare system, which is very much limited by the community providers,” says the University of Texas’ Lynda Chin. Watson’s evolution is rooted in its creators’ priority to make it capable of reading and understanding natural language, generating hypotheses, and locating and parsing evidence to support or refute them. Watson also has learned from its failures, its successes, and user feedback to become smarter over time. Read the article
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.