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.'"

Comments

Repurpsose for Criminology

[p0p0]

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.

Exactly What American Med Schools Want

[damn_registrars]

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.