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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."
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..
You do realize that memorizing and regurgitating known information is the perfect skill for 99.9% of medical diagnosis? As long as Watson knows how to say, "I don't know" it will be as good or better than the vast majority of humans at this particular task.
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...
However, they're still a ways to go before they can actually create new information.
This is true of most people.
Once they can do that though, that's when AI becomes a reality.
I always found it interesting that computers are never good enough until they can beat the best that humanity has to offer. Computers could beat most people at chess long before beating grand masters, but it wasn't until computers could beat the best human in the world that they were good enough. Likewise, Watson had to beat the best Jeopardy players before being good enough. So now, computers have to be better than the best doctor before being good enough. So, even if you make a computer that could graduate in the middle of a class of doctors, it won't be good enough until it can do better than them all. I just find it interesting as it says so much about us.
LISP and Prolog-based expert systems 30 years ago?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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!
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?"
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?
I was starting to listen to what you were saying until I read this.
The current standard treatment for Helicobacter Pylori is a triple-therapy regime which does indeed include antibiotics. It is highly effective and usually results in eradication.
Cimetidine hasn't been used as a treatment for ulcers in since the discovery of H. Pylori, many years ago. Considering that there are a number of modern antibiotics that are active against H. Pylori it is quite rare for a patient to not receive some antibiotic cocktail -- and even if there were a patient who (for some reason) could not receive *any* antibiotics, PPIs would almost certainly be used in place of cimetidine.
I'm sorry you have such a vendetta against physicians. Perhaps your views will change with age. I know that mine certainly did as I entered adulthood.
The real litigious bastards...
As a medical professional (neurologist-in-training, so I know about pain and "pain") these stories make me mad.
There is no such thing as "healing with the hands" if you had a serious limb asymmetry in your hips. If it was mild, it could be corrected with the right shoes and postural exercises to teach you stand the right way. If it was serious, you should have seen an orthopedic surgeon to correct it in a surgical way. If he*fixed* you just by touch the right spots, then you probably didn't have almost anything physical in the first place and most of your symptoms were in your mind.
BEAR WITH ME! I'm not trying to play down your pain and how you felt it, I'm just explaining to you in a rational way that many diseases and maladies are sometimes psychosomatic in origin and extension. I don't imply you are crazy or anything like that. I only say that you just wanted some hands-on caring, you didn't have anything really serious (organic) going on. And that's good news.
Just don't waste too much money on alternative treatments. If an alternative treatment works, then probably help from a family or friend works as well. You don't need a professional. But don't take any chances.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"