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Just Months After Jeopardy!, Watson Wows Doctors
kkleiner writes "Following its resounding victory on Jeopardy!, IBM's Watson has been working hard to learn as much about medicine as it can with a steady diet of medical textbooks and healthcare journals. In a recent demonstration to the Associated Press, Watson showed a promising ability to diagnose patients. The demonstration was a success, and it is the hope of IBM and many medical professionals that in the coming years Watson will lend doctors a helping hand as they perform their daily rounds."
"...in the coming years Watson will lend doctors a helping hand as they perform their daily rounds."
So basically, between the nurses and the computer, the doctors will now just have to smile and nod?
I am kidding of course, the more tools that medical professionals have the better.
[J]
This is just another step towards the realization of the movie "Idiocracy".
...welcome our robomedical overlords! Now, Mr. Watson, I've a raging case of hemorrhoids and a fissure that would drive even the sternest of men mad with rage. Help.
I always got the feeling my doctor was just googling my symptoms to come up with a diagnosis. Now I guess they won't be hiding it. I just hope that it doesn't make any silly mistakes like prescribing hysterectomies for men.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
and you have a talking medical tricorder.
.....Lupus
FTA: "To make the interactions Jeopardy!-style, speech solutions developer Nuance is currently working with IBM to provide Watson speech recognition software customized with medical jargon. Doctors could query Watson’s database on the go by speaking into a handheld device."
Fuck speech solutions. Why do we keep getting this crap pushed on us? Have the doctor text-message the frigging thing and not risk any speech-ambuiguity errors.
Judging from how well speech-menu phone systems work for me, I would run in panic before trusting anything from a speech-activated automatic doctor's assistant.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
When delivering a baby boy will pronounce, "You've got male."
...here we come!
All kidding aside, computers are certainly great at memorizing and regurgitating information, especially highly complex information with numerous variables involved. However, they're still a ways to go before they can actually create new information. Once they can do that though, that's when AI becomes a reality.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I bet it didn't study aromatherapy or herbal remedies either! What a useless machine!
BTW, Eliza could replace 99% of psychoanalytic therapy decades ago.
Hundreds of astrologers also agree with each other results: that is peer review.
You fucking nuts.
In order for a doctor to use a text input device, they'd have to be able to spell. And given the number of times my pharmacists have had to call for clarification or "interpret" a doctor's scrawl, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of them can't.
But that doesn't change the fact that speech-recognition technology still can't deal with accents very well, and it's been a long, long time since I've seen a doctor who was born and raised in north america.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Hello Patient, my name is Dr Sbaitso.
I am here to help you.
Say whatever is in your mind freely,
our conversation will be kept in strict confidence.
Memory contents will be wiped off after you leave,
So, tell me about your problems..
watson being way off is funny on jeopady hear that can kill some one and lead to IBM being sued.
As long as it doesn't play second fiddle to a crappy search mechanism in the old Mac OS, it should do fine.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
and then order a lumbar puncture, MRI and broad spectrum antibiotics for the infection and then ridicule its human doctors' diagnoses with its acerbic wit?
That dweeb will almost kill you twice or three times with misdiagnoses before he finds the right one.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Not recommended! He only responds to crashes, and most of the time you end up being disassembled...
open the pod bay doors Watson
I'm sorry Mr. Smith, but it appears you have an acute case of Toronto.
I'm all for having more expert computers in the fields, as it means we can potentially get better treatment. But, people tend to be lazy, and I'm sure, given as many patients as some doctors have to see in a day, that some of the people that are supposed to be doing what we hire doctors to do will be just asking watson for the treatment with probably only a half-assed attempt at verifying how good those results may be. It seems like Isabel might have a bit more promise in these markets for safety.
Also, if Isabel doesn't understand non-jargon, why not develop a way to use Watson to "translate" into technical speak for Isabel. Then again, that might just be a google translate style accident waiting to happen.
Are you mentally stable? The reason I ask him this, is simple (see these 2 posts of Pseudonym Authorities' folks, and then decide for yourselves):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2198230&cid=36370168
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2206226&cid=36370194
WTF! Are you sick in the head, or what??
We know you suck at computing already, based on your screwup on a simple principle in it here:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1881444&cid=34343366
But we had NO idea you needed mental help too! Time for your medication now I think, troll.
LISP and Prolog-based expert systems 30 years ago?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
the patient. If people in general learned to observe their behavior, physiology, and life with a bit of instruction on what to look for, medicine wouldn't nearly need as much diagnosis time as it now requires. Of course, this would also require people adjust their lifestyle when a diagnosis or treatment might call for it.
Throw massing amounts of computing power into diagnosing medical conditions, won't shorten the amount of time it takes to extract information from a patient on their lifestyle.
Personally, I seriously doubt that Watson will ever advance to being able to replace a doctor for non-trivial complaints. First of all, humans are better at image processing, so if a patient looks like death then they aren't going to ask questions to rule out minor complaints. Second, patients usually don't know how to describe their symptoms, and it's up to the doctor to make sense of what they're describing (keeping in mind that some exaggerate, some understate, and others outright lie). Third, clinical references are written for humans, so they often omit various "obvious" things (e.g. to get Lyme you have to have been bitten by a tick, which may not be very likely in Barrow, Alaska).
OTOH, I can see Watson being immensely useful on the back end. For example, which second-line blood pressure medications have been show to be highly effective with few side effects in 65 year old male caucasians who also have diabetes, and, of those, which has the best interaction profile with the other drugs this patient is taking? Clinical guidelines help, but they're obviously simplified and generalized. It'd take a human ages to research the literature to figure that out, but an AI like Watson could potentially do it in a few seconds. Such a tool could take a lot of the guesswork out of medicine.
Would an average "new" patient have the slightest clue about how to describe an ailment? Feel pain in chest= Watson's instant heart ailment regimen that dispenses nitro glycerin on the spot? It could work if the "new" patient were in the medical profession and had some idea how to phrase the question in the form of an answer.. Patient: "It hurts when I do this" Watson: "What is, don't do that?"
Pseudonym Authority: Time for your medication now
But did Watson prescribe that?
Just do as Geordi La Forged does. When he has a problem, he sits down and speaks into the air starting with the following statement "Computer...".
So, this is how much of our research will be conducted at office around the world. Get ready for the revolution. This will be much easier than "googling" you're way out of a problem. Much MUCH easier.
Production: Computer... have X-materials with Y-funding and an Z-deadline. What is the most profitable solution.
Investor: Computer...I have money in the bank and need to do some low frequency trading. Please review the past history and make me money.
Mechanic: Computer....These are my symptoms for this make/model a vehicle. This is the work previously done on it."
Inventor: Computer...design me the best fractal antenna you can.
Developer: Computer...design a better version of yourself, put it into production, and repeat. Queue theme music to the Terminator
Life is not for the lazy.
>> watson being way off is funny on jeopady hear that can kill some one and lead to IBM being sued.
This raises an interesting question. Is Watson a computer medical device or a Doctor?
The Supreme Court ruled that patients harmed by medical devices are prohibited from seeking damages from FDA approved devices.
Dr. Watson? Oh man, I remember that guy! He was always asking for my crash dumps.
Wow, the fight of the year:
The Gay-Sex-In-The-Army-Guy versus Hosts-File-Nutjob!
I'll grab the popcorn.
... detailed files on human anatomy.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/quotes
Of course it's company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article a d
You mean a giant computer is going to rely on science instead of back whacking and cracking? Gasp!
Also there is a disturbing idea of a giant unfeeling computer telling me to do science. Thank god she's not voiced by Ellen McLane.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
See subject. I read those posts of yours, and you are touched in the skull.
It will absolutely do a better job than a bad human. This should make a major difference in the long tail--i.e. things that aren't the obvious problem to the doctor, notably in second and third-rate hospitals. It will make procedural screw-ups a bigger cause of death and hospital problems as compared to medical malpractice. (I'm not sure what the ratio is now.)
It will also make humans more dumb and less thoughtful over time. That is, diagnostic skills will go down as diagnosis becomes done more and more by computer. The excellent doctors will still be excellent, but there will be even *less* requirement to really *think* about a problem than there is now.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I had a program that did a far better job of diagnosing patients than doctors could. But Doctors were not interested in actually doing a better doctoring job. They were strictly interested in making more money. Do you think they do plastic surgery because it cures people? Do you think they are treating ulcers with tagamet instead of antibiotics because the antibiotics would cure you fast? Do you think they would be avoiding using checklists in surgeries because checklists cut surgical complications by a factor of three?
No. These things would all decrease the Godhood of doctors. and their possible annual incomes.
wake up and hold your nose
Just bring us into the 21st century, for the love of FSM! Modern healthcare is not a doctor proscribing a treatment anymore... it's a network of specialists making recommendations and sharing data with each other. However, this "sharing" more often than not goes at pre-Internet speeds. Delays of days or even weeks are common as multiple opinions are sought, insurance companies are contacted, enormous paper portfolio are passed around, one for each facility... it's a real mess. It's not "doctoring" that keeps them busy; it's bureaucracy. It's reading test results off of carbon paper forms and waiting to see if their patient can even afford the "gold standard" treatment they want to give them (even if they're insured!)
Watson can't deal with any of that, really. And that ignores the danger bureaucratic errors can pose to an AI, such as test results that are inexplicably attributed to the wrong patient... what happens when Watson makes a crap diagnosis because of bad data? Can he eliminate bad data or even "show his work?"
Watson: Please state the nature of the medical emergency.
When "computers go wild," for a brief moment in time, humans will say "Woa... we made movies about this happening. Why were we so blind?"
BrNah, i'm completely kidding. "Insert Carl Sagan famous quote here."
No, wait, this one goes in your butt.
I don't think Doctors like the idea of being put out of a job. Remember the HMO's of the '90's and how they were the company to hate? Remember what they did? They'd look at a doctors notes and if the doctors conclusion didn't statistically match the symptoms they'd deny expensive coverage. It was a way to keep costs down. So hospital fought back with "Don't let anyone get between you and your doctor" campains. The result... the HMO's gave up, and now that anything the doctors say goes, we have soaring health costs. Imagine that. I don't see how it would be different with Watson. Paitent comes in, Watson hears all of their symptoms and recommends a simple home remedy, because statistically that's what their symptoms match. The paitent wanted their insurance to cover a medication and expensive treatment, and told that they were unique and special. Stupid computer, what does it know?
Even conventional doctors use touch for diagnosis. How is "Dr. Watson" supposed to compete? There's more to the practice of medicine than matching symptoms with pills.
Years ago I experienced a tremendous amount of pain when I was using the keyboard... Started when I was a freshman in college. I'm sure Slashdot was to blame, somehow... But anyways, it started with shooting pains up and down my right arm, so I switched to using my Thinkpad's trackpoint with my left index finger. Before long I had shooting pain up & down my right forearm too. But it wasn't so bad, so I just switched between index fingers on the trackpad, and added an external mouse...
I was more or less okay until I started my final CS2 project the night before it was due (deadline was at 8am, iirc). Spent all night working on it, had to start over at 1am because my first solution was hopelessly broken. Before long I had shooting pains across my shoulders and down my spine too.. Neck cracked constantly, and I was quite miserable.
The next semester I went t the campus health center... Doctor said I didn't have carpal tunnel syndrome, and that there was nothing wrong with me that a little exercise wouldn't fix, and prescribed me some double-strength ibuprofen.
The pills didn't touch the pain, and neither did exercise help. Went to another doctor, and got brushed off with the same useless platitude about exercise. I could have gained a dozen pounds, for sure, but my problem was not related to lack of exercise.
Drifted around for a few years... Went to seven chiropractors, who all agreed that I had a problem, but their treatments were not helpful. Eventually I went to a book signing by Dr. Zieve, and mentioned that I was looking for a member of the other profession that had a strong history for manual medicine. He asked "why", so I said something about the pain I experienced when using a keyboard. He said that my intended course of action might be appropriate, that there was only one such doctor locally, and whenever he needed that kind of care he went to see someone 100 miles away.
Eventually went to see this other doctor, and his skills were incredible. Told him why I was there, he asked if I'd ever broken a bone and I said 'no'. The first thing he found was that my left hip was an inch or an inch and a half higher than my right. None of the 7 doctors or 7 chiropractors had noticed that. One chiropractor said that one of my legs was longer than the other, but the last doctor I visited said he'd only had 2 or 3 patients over his 30 years of practice that actually had a leg-length disparity - all the rest had imbalanced hips, and when the muscle that was torquing the hips was calmed down, the hips leveled out and the leg-length disparity disappeared.
Then he had me lie down on is table. "You have a rib or two that's broken back here." What? I'd never broken a rib, as far as I knew...
"Like, an old break that's all healed up now?" The good doctor confirmed that this was the case.
The treatment continued as the doctor investigated why my hips and shoulders were torqued. Eventually he found the muscle (or 'twist' in the connective tissue) that was most responsible, applied just the right amount of pressure in just the right location, and felt a release.
There are 650 to 850 muscles in the human body. A doctor who specializes in hands-on treatments knows this anatomy by touch, and can feel (through the skin) when something is not like it should be. This is something like how you can tell if the road your car is driving on is iced over by the feedback you get through the steering wheel.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
What is new is that it works. The concept of a system that can search through all kinds of data and intelligently answer natural language questions is something that people have been trying at for a long time. However Watson works. There are restrictions, it is domain specific (the original Watson was for Jeopardy questions), it isn't perfect, and so on, but it works.
Hence all the excitement. It isn't that other systems didn't want to do something like this or promise this, it is that Watson delivers.
I for one am looking forward to the age of the drive through robotic doctor. It's kinda like a carwash - with MRIs and X-Rays built in. :p
It was to help solve this exact problem that we started MEDgle - http://www.medgle.com/ . We've just finished our app clinicians and starting beta testing with hospitals and urgent cares. Our focus is to enable scalable clinical operations powered by 100+ million relationships and algorithms. Also our entire health analytics cloud is available via our APIs - http://www.medgle.com/corp/developers/ . Just contact just for API access. Feedback and suggestions are very welcome. :)
Cheers
Ash
Though her name is wildly mispelled (even in Valve's own credits!), the correct spelling is Ellen McLain
Of course nobody reads the FAQ! If people read the FAQ, the Questions wouldn't be so Frequently Asked.
The irony of me misspelling misspelled is not lost on me. Of course, I see it 3 seconds after I submit and not during the preview.
Of course nobody reads the FAQ! If people read the FAQ, the Questions wouldn't be so Frequently Asked.
Surely it's no coincidence this nonsense medical PR went out on the same day Nintendo PR announces that the Wii U has something (unclear what) to do with IBM's Watson. It's veritible keyword association. And if it is not, well, this post is.
...all down the left side? And can Watson diagnose that?
A lot of comments her make me think of Shrunken Head Ned, the world's only Shrunken Head Village Doctor that plies his trade in the Adventureland in Disneyland. (At least, he used to. I haven't been there for a few years.) That's the way a good many of these comments seem to lean, that Watson as a medical AI is just a sort of amusement that can't be trusted.
I wouldn't trust Watson as a sole source of medical advice either but in combination with the right doctor who knows how to examine and work with people, Watson would make a good tool. It takes a good personal interaction to get all the symptoms from individuals and if the doctor was running into something that he couldn't quite make sense of then Watson might make the connection between seemingly unrelated things to help put the doctor on track to a diagnosis.
It's not a replacement for the doctor but a tool that the doctors can use when they've run into a wall they can't scale themselves. (that's a metaphor, by the way, for all those who will be trying to think of why doctors would be scaling walls to make a diagnosis. quit being so dang literal.)
I thought subluxication is a technical term for the terminal decoherence of a flux capacitor operating in excess of 1.21 gigawatts.
Doctors are easy and, if you're lucky, you're covered by insurance. I would like to be able to go to a mechanic and have my car fixed without them using my wallet to speculate on the problem.
Great, now Obamacare will be like playing Eliza
i have a terrible headache.
WHY DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU HAVE A TERRIBLE HEADACHE?
because my head hurts
WHY DOES YOUR HEAD HURT?
i don't know. maybe it was the three bottles of vodka i drank last night
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR MOTHER.
she was out of town last night
WHY WAS SHE OUT OF TOWN LAST NIGHT?
she had a date with someone she met on the internet
OH, SO THAT WAS YOUR MOTHER. THAT EXPLAINS A LOT.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Oh god, idicocracy is starting
Sometimes the most important thing a doctor can do for a patient is empathise. A call to a sick patient at home after sugery, some reassurance that you care about their well-being can make them feel 10x better than any pill. It's where the art of medicine really becomes an art rather than a science. I'm not worried about my job any time soon.
They took our jobs !!! ... took r jobs!!!
There is a nice toolkit called Languageware which could do this years ago.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ebusiness/jstart/downloads/LanguageWare_Scenarios.pdf
What I found interesting about it is after you teach it a certain amount of data that you could code it automatically learn from other data sources.
Will it be a hospital failure? Wil it be IBM the responsible? Maybe the one who earned money with it...
Last time I checked IBM shares were a good investment, and opening a medical practice was an expensive proposition.
I suspect access to Watson will be something that IBM profits from (which is good), and that it won't reduce the costs of running a medical practice.
Don't be surprised if pharmaceutical companies "sponsor" Watson for medical practitioners.
Would you like a bowel resection with that haemorroid removal and fissure stitch? May I recommend the fat reducing asthma medication trials? Perhaps sir would like to try our discount-medication-for-pharmaceutical-research-program??
Wait for the "but sir requested the penile reduction, crackle, hiss, my programmer desires you wife, crackle...
How about - "I'm sorry sir, but I must halt your heart surgery due to an injunction granted in East Texas by SCO-rebooted"
But wait, there's more! Nintendo's recently announced homeopathic robot, Poirot, faces a patent challenge from Microsoft's mobile acupuncture and moxybustion robots- Pricks and Burns!
:-D
I was watching a documentary - made in the 1960s - where people travelling in spaceships not only routinely conversed with computers, but also had a device which would instantly recognize alien languages and translate back and forth.
The main dude in the doc was quite the swordsman; even did it with a green chick.
Anyways, this technology has been available for decades. You have too keep up, or be drowned in a Hype-R-Wave.
Will Watson have scanned in all those excellent Chiropractic YouTube videos?
I certainly hope not. Or ping pong, or psychic healing. The idea is to teach Watson about medicine.
Most people today might as well live with pigs as in the middle ages the only difference is that they can text via their cell phone to another PIG. This was not possible in the Dark Ages.
And Twitter. You forgot Twitter, and Facebook. And Fox news.
They change everything.
When systems become too automated there's the risk that humans will not learn some basic procedures. Then, when an unexpected situation happens, no one can do anything to solve it.
It seems that this is what happened in Air France flight 447 which crashed over the Atlantic ocean killing 228 people in 2009. The Airbus 330 was considered "impossible" to stall. Apparently in flight 447 the air speed sensors became clogged with ice and the plane did stall because of the incorrect speed readings. During the 4 minutes it took to plunge down into the sea, the three pilots were so confused they they were unable to perform the simplest procedure every pilot is taught at school, to point the nose down to gather enough speed to get out of the stall.
"If we wanted to" we could be making leaps in AI. However that would require it shifting from the subconsciously scary area it is now to a National Priority.
We play True Scotsman games on AI. We keep shifting the rules every time a goal is reached.
Huge swaths of life are easy to model. IBM's results are more sudden than your "slow gradual" metric. Chess was the game Comp Sci "grew up on". It took thousands of programmers 30 years to merge into the results they have now. In contrast, IBM just showed up sorta out of the blue and said "Hi. We want to play a game. We'll start with *champions*".
Now they're doing diagnostics as good (or better?) than doctors? The article is a polite way to say that 12 years of med training is being shadowed by a piece of software that anyone can have in three years when Moore catches up on the hardware side.
It takes a lot of work to become a competent person. While we're being distracted by the **AA, we're forgetting that copying works on AI !! So (with a nod to Steve Jackson) all we need is a Generic Universal AI System and just add modules.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
the hospital scene where they do the diagnosis with wands?
medical zebras do exist.....
this will allow for the supplantation of medical professionals with machines..
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Symptoms: Runny nose, watery eyes
Diagnosis: Seasonal allergies
Recommended Action: Reboot
Uh-oh...
To be fair: medical expert systems have been around for a long time, watson isn't the first AI which can competently second guess doctors diagnosis.
How many doctors want a machine second guessing their decisions? The move towards HMOs and the limits these new organizations placed on doctors drove many docs out of the practice.
If a Watson-generated recommendation is followed, can Dr Watson be sued for mal-practice? What about IBM?
If Watson is to be used, I'd recommend using it as a data collection and retrieval tool. Pulling relevant patient records is difficult. From what I've noticed in doctors' offices, the systems they use are clunky and difficult to input let alone retrieve data..
Using technology like Watson to generate trends and recommend cost saving procedures could play a huge part in actually reducing healthcare costs. If a cheaper procedure or course of treatment is more effective, the collection and analysis of medical data could generate the best recommendations.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
The whole team is disbanded and replaced by HAL 9000.
~Syberz
Everytime I try to open an article the copyright owning website pops up a price of $50 to read it. This Dr. Watson must be running up an enormous bill.
Healthcare cost reduced by removing human doctor. Then runs into tens of thousands of dollars to diagnose a cold.
To funny, I almost hit the floor on that one. So, almost ,rofl
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
You mean a giant computer is going to rely on science instead of back whacking and cracking? Gasp!
Ex-Trapolate! Ex-Trapolate! The Daa-leks are supreme!
> I bet it didn't study aromatherapy
I bet a PRG would be sufficient for this...
I would just like to add the fact that doctors don't just think about the diagnosis, they also obtain data from patients. Not only by clinical
examination (try pushing Watson around when a patient is dying from e.g. pneumothorax in the street) but most importantly from the interview,
which I assume is not Watson's or any machine's strong point. And before you say anything about Elisa or whatever, do not underestimate
the subtlety and difficulty of verbal and non-verbal communication with patients in distress, with the demented, intoxicated, delirious, neurotic, comatose
etc.
In real life, Watson will be just a step higher than huge databases like UpToDate or AccessMedicine providing more intelligent feedback to
actual doctors. I don't think Watson will be able to feed himself clinical (as opposed to laboratory) data for the moment.
Also, don't forget that under current law you cannot sue an AI. A doctor has to sign somewhere at some point...
House M.D. will get a lot less interesting now.
I'm curious what biases this would present...If two diseases have similar symptoms, will Watson get more hits and suggest the one with the best "awareness" and funding over the one that most fits the symptoms, or the one that affects the largest percent of patients? I.E., if breast cancer research is more frequently studied*, then will Watson be more likely to suggest "breast cancer" than diseases that better fit the symptoms?
* (and I don't know if it is. Just take it as a hypothetical)
...when you can have this http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/05/13/2134228/Invent-the-Medical-Tricorder-Win-10000000
I wonder if they are trying to win the tricorder x-prize.
...IBM just showed up sorta out of the blue...
I see what you did there.
A planet was driven by an ancient computer system, it solved all their issues. The planet was home for a bunch of humanoid retards. I don't think this is a good application for a computer. We need to be able to do our own research, remember by our mistakes, etc. A computer should be a research too... i.e. build mathematical simulation modules, not hold all the medical research text and have answers to our queries. This will cause mental atrophy. It's bad enough that most of us suck at spelling and math now. Let's not suck at logic and reasoning too.
Daleks aren't computers, they're remorseless killing machines with a soft gooey biological center.
I was talking about GLaDOS.
Then again, they're just talking about doing diagnosis.
When Watson starts doing *testing*...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Seems like they're definitely angling for the funding of the recently posted medical tricorder prize
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/05/13/2134228/Invent-the-Medical-Tricorder-Win-10000000
If successful, it would give them money to work with for years to come.
This one goes in your mouth. This one goes in your ear. This one goes up your butt.
What the...? Wait. No. This one goes in your mouth. This one goes in your ear. This goes up your butt.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I wonder if they're pointing it at the data itself looking for inconsistencies or flaws. In all that data, some fraction of it will be erroneous. Watson would be the best equipped to dig that out.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I wonder if they're pointing it at the data itself looking for inconsistencies or flaws. In all that data, some fraction of it will be erroneous. Watson would be the best equipped to dig that out.
How else could it possibly work? Randomise decisions to cope with a knowledge base built on conflicting information? Weighting doesn't lead to decisions suitable for treatment - just decisions to make further tests.
The use of these sorts of programs to process and make sense of huge amounts of incomplete data is truly interesting though. It's not uncommon to hear of identical symptoms receiving identical treatment, with differing outcomes - logically the diagnosis was made with insufficient data. Programs similar to Watson that could post process huge amounts of data the doctors don't have access to, might produce some useful knowledge. Your doctor doesn't know what you really eat. Do you? Your doctor doesn't know who you have contact with, or what you think. But a program that was plugged into the banks would know about your finances, and Facebook could give useful information about your state of mind. And if Facebook bought Redtube (and Nintendo) they could contribute data on your sex life. Maybe Google and Microsoft (Melissa and Bill care about us, a lot) could kick in somehow? Did StreetView see you snarfing a double big whopper?. Maybe if Microsoft gets enough data about you they can cure cancer! Apple (though I know Steve thinks a bong cures everything) could send in data from iPhones to show how much exercise your getting, and what you've been downloading from iTunes.
Feeling a bit ill and you go to viist Watson.... who sees you've been downloading heavy metal, knows who's been sleeping with the people you've been sleeping with (and seen the movies), and what you've been buying with your "untraceable bitcoins" (damn smart meters, and, told you not to torrent while you tor!) - prescribes antidepressants, penicillin, treatment for anal warts, signs you up for rehab, and puts you on suicide watch. Which will teach you to secure your wireless modem in future..
how many of us ask friends and family if they can recommend an *average* doctor? No, we ask for a good doctor...and while the doctor may in fact be average...that is generally unknown to us. I wouldn't accept a software doctor that was known to be average!
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
me: "fuck you"
computer: "how do you feel about fuck you"
ahh...this was such fun as a teenager in the early 90's...getting my PC to "learn" to swear.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I was just thinking it might be a useful tool even if it's not attempting to diagnose an individual patient at that moment (or session, or thread, ...).
Eg., Watson's asked to diagnose a patient. It does so to the best of its ability, and that fires up housekeeping jobs in the background that notice that five prestigious sources said $blah on the subject, while another contradicted or added value the others didn't mention. Which data needs to be followed up? Is the one source under-informed or incorrect, or are the other five?
As for all your other tinhat ravings, I suspect Watson's subject to medical privacy law. It doesn't need to know who the patient is.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
After being sick for 8 years with an unknown condition and going to doctor after doctor, I can say with absolute certainty that doctors are terrible diagnosticians. Each specialist will consider the top three conditions people come in for, and if you don't have them, then it's no longer worth their time to diagnose. After about 60 seconds of listening to you, their eyes glaze over and they've heard enough. I have long wanted to write a program to diagnose issues and eventually replace most doctors altogether. It would serve us all better.
Consider the huge amount of possible causes - viruses, bacteria, fungal infections, environmental contaminants, parasites, biological weapons, genetic abnormalities leading to enzymatic and neurological imbalances.. There is an incredible breadth of possibility. What doctor could possibly consider all the options? He'll only be able to call upon the most common answers, or just throw popular antibiotics or drugs at the problem.
Now throw a diagnostic AI into the mix, who has all of your personal information - where you've traveled and lived, your age, your genetic profile, your symptoms, a blood sample, the past success or failure of drugs, and perhaps in a moment it could come up with a list of 40 possibilities. It could then ask pointed questions to narrow it down and then request and analyze blood tests, x-rays, MRIs, CTs, until it had an answer. What doctor could or would do that? I haven't met one that even comes close. If you're unlucky enough like me to have something rare, be prepared to spend a decade trying to get a diagnosis.
I wonder if Therac-25 was FDA approved. Weird what we end up with, wrt legal systems, morality, responsibility, ... when mortals are involved.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I was just thinking it might be a useful tool even if it's not attempting to diagnose an individual patient at that moment (or session, or thread, ...).
Eg., Watson's asked to diagnose a patient. It does so to the best of its ability, and that fires up housekeeping jobs in the background that notice that five prestigious sources said $blah on the subject, while another contradicted or added value the others didn't mention. Which data needs to be followed up? Is the one source under-informed or incorrect, or are the other five?
Like when I said:-
The use of these sorts of programs to process and make sense of huge amounts of incomplete data is truly interesting though. It's not uncommon to hear of identical symptoms receiving identical treatment, with differing outcomes - logically the diagnosis was made with insufficient data. Programs similar to Watson that could post process huge amounts of data the doctors don't have access to, might produce some useful knowledge.
Do you have a reading problems as well?
As for all your other tinhat ravings,
It's a joke Mr "takes himself to seriously oooh Sony's got universal root kit". Though many of those systems have been proposed, and some of them are being worked on.
I suspect Watson's subject to medical privacy law.
Watson is a program. I suspect you don't have any more of an idea about medical privacy law than you do about expert systems. Catch Data, Data Warehouse, and many others - have all your medical records. We do a lot of work for a local variant - cataloguing xray results for a nation. Only last month we worked on a research project processing the entire DNA database for Orkney - and the client was many companies with access to that data. You don't own your medical information, indeed you don't own your DNA.
It doesn't need to know who the patient is.
You don't get out much do you?
.
The reality is that the mean accuracy of human diagnosis is still about the same as the Mycin program from the 1960s - still - and that was on computers of the era. Human diagnosis simply sucks, on average already, so computer diagnosis doesn't have to be very much better to better it. Human's have a longer tail on the accuracy distribution but the number doctors (and the chances you'll ever see any from that population) is very small.
Part of the problem is the information overload of possible diseases for any vaguely defined set of symptoms (patients suck as describing what ails them): the exotica stuff like on House is an example but a horrible standard to hold up - you shouldn't have to go to the extremes like that which is why I find House entertaining in the abstract but also horrifying. There should be no reason to ever have any medical practices like House where he's the "guru" for unsolvable. Hell, I usually get the diagnosis myself but certainly a computer with a full database of any known disease could do as well.
And healthcare cost control only makes this so much worse. Basically the optimal point for humans in the loop is probably already defined (and not able to be bettered with human doctors) and current US health care is already de-optimized for accuracy and health efficacy from that point because of cost pressures.
The correct realm for this is health triage and maintenance without doctors or nurses in the loop at all. Basically screen conservatively with a computer pre-diagnosis set to indicate whether something is self-treatable or if escalation to an actual doctor or nurse is advised. Yes, I know lawyers will make that impractical in the US but that's why health care in the US 1) will get still worse, much worse, and 2) it won't get better in anyone's lifetime. The best place to release such a thing is not in the US or developed world because their systems are too rigid to allow for innovation. Instead a developing country can and will still make the best cost-benefit choices without the bias of an entrenched monopolistic revenue extraction regimes (lawyers and doctors, as ABA and AMA control of these professions are such regimes).
House has gone digital...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2223334&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=36382818
Seems Pseudonym Authority's twisted freak trolling days are over. He sure can dish it out, but when he gets re-trolled, especially when it exposes his deviant nature.
(and, I mean truly deviant, like this post of Pseudonym Authority's also http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2198230&cid=36371050 )
Pseudonym Authority runs from sheer embarassment, just like most cowardly trolls do, except that Pseudonym Authority's definitely a sick twisted deviant freak.
(Take a read of that 2nd link above I just posted, and tell us different.)
Get this through your head too, troll: The "Lord of HOSTS" wins, everytime.
Patient: The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Watson : The wine is good but the meat is rotten.
We are heading for MULTIVAC...
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?