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Watson Goes To Medical School
First time accepted submitter Kwyj1b0 writes "I.B.M's Watson is headed to the Cleavland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University for training. Clinicians and students will answer and correct Watson's questions, in an attempt to crowdsource its education. From the article: '“Hopefully, we can contribute to the training of this technology,” said Dr. James K. Stoller, chairman of the Education Institute at Cleveland Clinic. The goal, he added, was for Watson to become a “very smart assistant.” Part of Watson’s training will be to feed it test questions from the United States Medical Licensing Exam, which every human student must pass to become a practicing physician. The benefit for Watson should be to have a difficult but measurable set of questions on which to measure the progress of its machine-learning technology.'"
oops, looks like I couldn't bother verb there. I should get a /. editor job too.
I recently worked at IBM and this is one of the things they really love to showcase - I think primarily because it's really cool, but also has really useful end results - exactly the kind of thing you want to be working on.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Design another Watson designed as a database for crimes which could analyse crime scenes, point out potential minute details and give data on similar crimes. Then call it... Holmes.
I'd like that.
Watson actually does some really cool stuff with respect to not just being 'do this' - it tells you what it 'thinks', but also tells you why it thinks those things, and how sure it is of that. So it will say 'I think it's likely the patient has Y because of family history, environmental factors, this symptom and these studies', etc... It's more giving the doctor all the (relevant) information possible than telling the doctor what to do.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Particularly since the way it work is by probabilities. So a physician goes and inputs all the symptoms a patient reports, perhaps along with a confidence of how likely it is to be real. Watson could then spit out the likely causes, and the probability of each, as well as how to narrow it down. Then with additional tests, they can exclude things and get a re-factored list.
It won't remove the need for a medical professional with good judgement, but it could be a boon for searching through things and presenting possibilities. What's more each new case can be logged, improving its database.
So when someone presents with a rare disease, it would be much easier for a physician to diagnose it, even if they've never heard of it.
If implemented right, it could cut down on misdiagnosis a ton.
The American Medical Schools select for automatons who can memorize and regurgitate vast amounts of data. Talk to any physician who graduated from med school in the past 20 years about what they took as undergrads and they'll most likely tell you they don't remember the courses specifically because they memorized them to pass (and then promptly forgot them).
The real question is whether or not this is the best way to train our future health care professionals. While indeed there are some really good physicians coming out of our med schools - and even some of those who memorized their way through undergrad will be great physicians - we have also excluded from selection many who would have been excellent caregivers based on their inability to memorize quite as quickly as their classmates.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
lots of colleges put to much on cramming for tests and not much on being able to do stuff in a real setting. Closed book / closed notes / no Google tests only test memorizing.
What professionals one who is real good at test cramming or on who knows most of the day to day stuff and how to lookup the other stuff that they need at the time they need it. is better?
No humans involved. Only computers and the occasional tech support call to Bangalore.
No one. Duh.
"I.B.M's Watson is headed to the Cleavland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University...
/. can't afford its own watson, how about a spell checker??? They are much cheaper and much, much less likely to make mistakes.
And if
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You are wrong, broadly speaking. This is the whole point of machine learning: given a very complicated task that it would take a human a tremendous amount of effort to program correctly, you can instead get the machine to figure out how to perform the task itself, rather than explicitly programming it to do one thing. Some types of learning are supervised, particularly classifiers: I tell the computer which items belong to which class, and given a new, previously unseen item, the computer attempts to determine its class based on the training. Others are unsupervised: set the robot free in the environment with some goal function and let it learn through trial-and-error how to optimize its behavior toward the goal. Watson is a combination of first-order logic (prolog and a huge kb) and a variety of such learning algorithms. Some of this is stuff that was considered an industry failure in the 80s but, paired with modern machine learning techniques, is quite powerful. Indeed we may be seeing the first instances of computers that have some form of this "intelligence" of which you speak, though I think we are still a long way from "strong AI".