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IBM's Watson Used In Life-Saving Medical Diagnosis (businessinsider.co.id)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the damn-it-Jim-I'm-a-doctor-not-a-supercomputer dept.

"Supercomputing has another use," writes Slashdot reader rmdingler, sharing a story that quotes David Kenny, the General Manager of IBM Watson: "There's a 60-year-old woman in Tokyo. She was at the University of Tokyo. She had been diagnosed with leukemia six years ago. She was living, but not healthy. So the University of Tokyo ran her genomic sequence through Watson and it was able to ascertain that they were off by one thing. Actually, she had two strains of leukemia. They did treat her and she is healthy."

"That's one example. Statistically, we're seeing that about one third of the time, Watson is proposing an additional diagnosis."

83 comments

  1. Calling BS on this one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Reads like an IBM ad.

    1. Re: Calling BS on this one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey, at least IBM isn't calling this AI in this ad.

    2. Re: Calling BS on this one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why shouldn't they? Expert systems are one category of what is commonly called AI.

  2. Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    Enough to see all these thinly-veiled ads, but it'd be nice to see Watson be proved wrong.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
    1. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by skids · · Score: 4, Insightful

      1) Why? Why would it be nice?
      2) Since it is an expert system, it probably already has an error rate. That's how expert systems work. They generate probable leads which feed into a diagnostic process as one contributing input. All IBM needs to prove here is that the leads a probabilistically worth the cost to generate them and the cost to follow up on them.

      --
      Someone had to do it.
    2. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by ShooterNeo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm sure it gets it wrong lots of times, but so do humans. It's only a problem (with Watson) if humans wrongfully assume it to be infallible or if Watson gets it wrong so often it's useless. This does not seem to be the case.

    3. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by sethstorm · · Score: 1

      Why? Why would it be nice?

      To see the fallibility of Watson. Just as it was nice for Patterson to observe the original Watson seeing his own desk on fire, it is similarly nice to see Watson fail.

      Since it is an expert system, it probably already has an error rate.

      Yet we have not seen it in any final results. On the other hand, we've seen Watson's PR-friendly "successes".

      --
      Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
    4. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You'd probably like the montage of Watson during his Jeopardy practice sessions making a fool out of himself.

    5. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You both got it wrong. There is no holographic doctor making independent treatment decisions. Watson is just a program offering up likely diagnosis to actual doctors who then go "hmm, that makes sense!"

    6. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except this diagnosis was additional, so that means the other diagnosis that it (and the doctors) made where wrong.

    7. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by Z00L00K · · Score: 2

      Which is no different from what doctors make today. There are a lot of doctors taking guesstimates from the sampled data they have on a patient. Unfortunately they don't always listen to the patient and think that the problem is solved when they have put in a treatment. Sometimes that causes patients to get a treatment on anti-depressants when the problem is with the thyroid. So they are just hiding the symptoms.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    8. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, all IBM needs to do is make claims from a bunch of disparate techniques and software under the purely-marketing category of "Watson", create a halo effect from that for their consulting services and miscellaneous hardware, and thus reap massive financial rewards from C-level executives, the gullible, and the stupid (by no means discrete groups).

      Exactly as they are doing.

    9. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, and here is the developer site, have fun: https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/

      We eagerly await your findings.

    10. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by nbauman · · Score: 1

      It's only a problem (with Watson) if humans wrongfully assume it to be infallible or if Watson gets it wrong so often it's useless. This does not seem to be the case.

      That's the question: Does Watson get it wrong so often it's useless? And do people wrongly assume it's infalliable?

      The only way to tell is to do a large randomized, controlled trial in which half the doctors are using Watson and half aren't, and see whether the doctors with Watson have better outcomes than the doctors without Watson.

      That's the way they study new imaging techniques (which is how they know a lot of imaging is useless).

      When they publish a randomized, controlled trial in a major medical journal, then I'll be interested.

      Until then, Watson is just making the doctor's job more expensive, complicated and difficult.

    11. Re:Let's see Watson get it *wrong*. by DeVilla · · Score: 1

      Define "wrong". Watson might make 10 recommendations. For each it provides the information, references and "reasoning" it used to come to the conclusion. In the end the doctor always makes the choice. When a doctor doesn't take the top recommendation and goes with say recommendation 2, you ask the doctor what Watson had wrong and add to Watson's reference information.

      The important point though is the doctor is still the one who decides the diagnosis. Watson is just a tool to help find more pieces of information that fit together well.

      This goes in your mouth ... this one goes in your ear ... and this one goes in your butt.
      Hang on a second....

  3. DNA Sequencing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Leaving aside IBM plugging Watson, which is just them trying to market a brand into healthcare, the actual Leukemia detection was DNA sequencing with abnormalities correlated to research papers.

    That in turn suggested she was pre-disposed to Myelodysplastic cancers, and needed blood transfusions, and other support drugs.

    It looks like IBM wants to perform the middle-man deception on an epic scale here. Where the 'expertise' is being presented as IBMs when in fact its just searching others research papers with a not-very good language parser to grab references to the gene from the documents.

    1. Re:DNA Sequencing by NotInHere · · Score: 2

      I fully agree. The entire gene analyzing startup industry does this though, like 23andme or others. They are basically grep inc.

    2. Re:DNA Sequencing by Comrade+Ogilvy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What Watson did is something any intern with time on his or her hands could have achieved by looking at the data, searching in a medical database, and then a long bit of drudgery finding the wheat among the chaff. And if it were an intern, we would applaud that person for surprising tenacity and "vision" in helping a patient when seasoned doctors failed.

      Why do you need to denigrate that? Why do you need to concoct a phony baloney different standard when a computer succeeds where humans failed?

    3. Re: DNA Sequencing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think some people just reduce all problems to a basic summary, then once they can feel superior by letting everyone know that if it's just such a basic thing they could do it in a few lines of perl that they're clearly winning at life and these other engineers are just faking it and deserve zero credit.

      It's a way of masking their own insecurities.

    4. Re:DNA Sequencing by Kjella · · Score: 1

      What Watson did is something any intern with time on his or her hands could have achieved by looking at the data, searching in a medical database, and then a long bit of drudgery finding the wheat among the chaff.

      And perhaps the important part is that the wheat:chaff ratio is only getting worse as we get more and more knowledge about increasingly obscure conditions. Practically we can only ask doctors to learn this much before they have to start practicing medicine. Practically we don't have time for interns to chase needles in a haystack very often.

      Sure, in theory you could boil it down to a theory of indicators and counter-indicators combined with tables on base incidence and prevalence, modifiers for age, sex and other risk factors, co-morbidity with known conditions etc. and then this would be almost pure math and probability. In practice it's usually not that easy to make the data that structured though, and then you need Watson to say that what researcher A said in this paper is the same as doctor B wrote in this journal.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:DNA Sequencing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >What Watson did is something any intern with time on his or her hands could have achieved by looking at the data...

      Most things we have computers do are things that humans can do. But there's something attractive about getting others to do our tasks. And I don't mean 'faster' or more 'accurately' I mean just literally doing things for us in any capacity.

      And we ain't the first. According to ancient Babylonian mythology humans we created to do the menial labors the gods were tired of doing. Always seeing things in a manner that we can pass the mundane stuff onto lessors.

    6. Re:DNA Sequencing by nbauman · · Score: 1

      We're denigrating the way David Kenny was making vague claims rather than giving us the critical, specific facts that we need to tell whether Watson is a new toy or actually useful. We're denigrating Kenny for talking like a salesman, not like a scientist.

      Statistically, we're seeing that about one third of the time, Watson is proposing an additional diagnosis.

      That's great. Statistically, how often does that additional diagnosis turn out to be correct, how often does that additional diagnosis change the way the patient is treated, and how often is the outcome any better?

      A British radiologist working in the US described the difference between the 2 systems.

      When he was training in the UK, he told his supervisor that he wanted to x-ray a patient. His supervisor said, You already have the diagnosis, and the treatment plan. How will this x-ray change anything? The radiologist realized it wouldn't change anything, so it was useless, and he didn't do it.

      In the US, doctors routinely ask him to x-ray patients because they've always done it that way. They get a lot of useless, expensive x-rays. That's the attitude we're denigrating.

    7. Re:DNA Sequencing by nbauman · · Score: 1

      You got it. Out of mod points, sorry.

    8. Re:DNA Sequencing by nbauman · · Score: 1

      That's right.

      I expect that an experienced oncologist could have done the same with the information in his brain, without the drudgery.

      All he has to say is, "Let's order that leukemia DNA test panel."

    9. Re: DNA Sequencing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Watson AI systems do far more than an intern can do. They scan truly massive amounts of data and apply multiple types of semantic analysis and machine learning algorithms to build very complex models of information. Models that can then be queried or reasoned upon from either conventional or unconventional viewpoints. And all of that in minutes or seconds, and with almost no supervision.

        A human intern left unsupervised, on the other hand, will likely just use Facebook a lot and produce little useful or novel information.

    10. Re:DNA Sequencing by stoatwblr · · Score: 1

      " and then a long bit of drudgery finding the wheat among the chaff."

      Drudgery is exactly the kind of thing that computers are good at and humans aren't.

      A human researcher might have made the discovery, but it would probably take so long the patient would already be dead.

      Yes, the original article is an IBM marketing piece but this kind of advanced greppery is likely to be the norm in a few years.

  4. That's nice and all, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Kenny says that what Watson is not just being used to cure cancer, "but to just recommend what you should watch next" and even to recommend âoewhat ad you you should watch next."

    That's what Watson is really being used for, fucking advertising. And it didn't "cure" cancer, either.

    1. Re:That's nice and all, but by fox171171 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Kenny says that what Watson is not just being used to cure cancer, "but to just recommend what you should watch next" and even to recommend âoewhat ad you you should watch next."

      That's what Watson is really being used for, fucking advertising. And it didn't "cure" cancer, either.

      Yes, that woman should have quietly died waiting for a human doctor to figure out what was wrong with her.

    2. Re:That's nice and all, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And now she'll get a $135,000,000.00 medical bill from Dr Watson.

    3. Re:That's nice and all, but by darkain · · Score: 1

      Microsoft will gladly take that money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    4. Re:That's nice and all, but by Z00L00K · · Score: 2

      Not every country bills the patients.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    5. Re:That's nice and all, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microsoft would be more likely to kill the patient.

      "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

    6. Re: That's nice and all, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My country (the United States) doesn't bill patients, either. Doctors do that.

    7. Re:That's nice and all, but by smooth+wombat · · Score: 1

      When the money is taken from you, you're paying the bill as a patient whether you want to be one or not.

      --
      We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
  5. Native advertising by thesjaakspoiler · · Score: 2

    .. did not know it would pop up so prominently on /.

  6. Watson is the future...and the future is good. by Comrade+Ogilvy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My personal opinion is most doctors are probably pretty bad at diagnosing non-obvious issues. We do not actually need Watson to replace the doctors. We need Watson as another opinion who looks at the data in another way, and can usefully point to the long tail of uncommon to rare things that have a statically reasonable likelihood of being relevant. Many of these uncommon things, why would expect a doctor to actually be competent at diagnosing them? When would they have built that kind expertise?

    Taking TFA at face value, the doctors were ignoring data right under their noses. Watson found it by simply looking. It is not a matter of Watson have some magical genius. It is a matter of Watson being simply and thoroughly competent at many, many easy things that most doctors can never be expected to learn.

    1. Re:Watson is the future...and the future is good. by geekmux · · Score: 2

      My personal opinion is most doctors are probably pretty bad at diagnosing non-obvious issues. We do not actually need Watson to replace the doctors. We need Watson as another opinion who looks at the data in another way, and can usefully point to the long tail of uncommon to rare things that have a statically reasonable likelihood of being relevant. Many of these uncommon things, why would expect a doctor to actually be competent at diagnosing them? When would they have built that kind expertise?

      Taking TFA at face value, the doctors were ignoring data right under their noses. Watson found it by simply looking. It is not a matter of Watson have some magical genius. It is a matter of Watson being simply and thoroughly competent at many, many easy things that most doctors can never be expected to learn.

      In other words, we DO actually need Watson to replace the doctors, which you have quite clearly demonstrated to be incompetent of providing accurate diagnoses that include ALL variables due to the overall complexity today.

      By the way, this concept should be familiar, as years ago computers started replacing human work. It only makes sense that evolution continues where complexities are well beyond a human capability.

    2. Re:Watson is the future...and the future is good. by KingOfBLASH · · Score: 1

      I think the more realistic reason is that a doctor simply can't know every single rare condition off the top of his or her head, and many rare conditions share symptoms with common conditions, making it easy to overlook. You also might be surprised how often doctors who pop out of the room are sneaking a peak into a text book to confirm treatment.

      That's why diagnosis might change going to a specialist (who is going to be more familiar with rare conditions).

      Additionally, I see no harm in adding in an additional diagnostic tool to the doctors arsenal.

    3. Re:Watson is the future...and the future is good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Doctors are human. They have deficiencies such as confirmation bias, recency bias, etc that can be mitigated using a tool like this. The problem is that doctors tend to be arrogant, as evidenced by many eschewing checklists for procedures even when such checklists have proven effective in reducing medical errors. What is needed is for administrators to force such tools as checklists and expert systems into use to act as checks-and-balances against human error.

  7. Me too, kinda by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I had 4 ailments. My primary care doctor was correct about one of them, and wrong about the other three. My other specialist doctors (ENT and 2 GI doctors) were also wrong about one of them. I, a non-medical person, was right about the other 3.

    Therefore I conclude that doctors are idiots and health insurance is a waste of money.

    But more seriously, do your own research and fight for yourself.

    1. Re:Me too, kinda by hidflect · · Score: 3

      I had a similar situation. I realised that doctors are just statisticians trained to pick the most likely cause regardless of hunches or suspicions. And so they also ignore you because what you say is anecdotal and not backed by statistical trial. If they waiver from that, they open themselves up to malpractice suits for ignoriing the statistically most likely cause. Only when they are sure the judgement is an error will they then move to the next most statistically likely cause, and so on.

  8. small computer improvements can be worth a lot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Doctor time is very expensive, and there are a lot of doctors. If there is a computer program, which can make an individual doctor a small amount better, a somewhat worse doctor might be able to suffice. Maybe in the future, there will be nurse practitioner oncologists, whom can use MRIs, xrays, tumor sequencing, and Wastons to do the grunt work on cancer patients, while the super expensive oncologist will sign off, or disapprove on treatments.

  9. BI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is /. still affiliated with Business Insider?
    Why are we looking at a story about an IBM machine being used by UTokyo on BI's .co.id site?

    Not saying it's not a valid story, just curious.

  10. How much does it cost? by kriston · · Score: 1

    How much does it cost?

    I'm asking because it cost me $4,000 out-of-pocket to merely identify if my uncommon, congenital disorder is the really bad kind or just the somewhat inconvenient kind (it was the latter).

    Doing a differential analysis must cost a boatload of cash on top of this.

    --

    Kriston

    1. Re:How much does it cost? by roman_mir · · Score: 0

      How much did it cost before Watson? How much will it cost in 10 years? Those are more interesting questions and I think the cost will drop (of course while the government further destroys the value of money with inflation, printing, to wipe out its debts). In general technology makes the infinitely expensive feasable and the feasable becomes affordable. If not for the government destroying money, taxing and oppressing with laws, we could have affordable fully private health insurance and care bought pit of pocket and not tied to employment.

      --
      You can't handle the truth.
  11. "You've got leprosy, goodbye." by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    "You've got leprosy, goodbye."

    1. Re:"You've got leprosy, goodbye." by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Informative

      Considering some diseases out there it would be a relief to get that diagnosis.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    2. Re:"You've got leprosy, goodbye." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ummm...leprosy is easily curable, with a dose of antibiotics. Not fatal at all.

  12. No, the doctors were not ignoring anything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No, the doctors were not ignoring anything. They a) treated her cancer, b) tested for secondary cancers when she didn't recover, that test was negative, then c) DNA gene sequenced her to see if she was pre-disposed to cancers that would otherwise be undetectable after chemo or radiation therapy, which is where Watson came in. As a search engine. Not a second opinion, its simply a lookup engine.

    Maybe they should use a DNA lookup without all the IBM baggage next time doctors! IT departments long ago realized that IBM is corporate cancer.

    http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/08/11/national/science-health/ibm-big-data-used-for-rapid-diagnosis-of-rare-leukemia-case-in-japan/

    "She underwent chemotherapy at the hospital, which successfully attacked the cancer cells.

    "However, her recovery from post-remission therapy was unusually slow. Tojo said this led doctors to suspect a different type of leukemia, though conventional tests failed to show any sign of it.

    "That was when the institute turned to IBM’s Watson, a cloud-based AI-powered computer system that has ingested tens of millions of oncology papers and vast volumes of leukemia data made available by international research institutes.

    "To find out more about the cause of her illness, the researchers supplied the woman’s genetic data, and Watson cross-checked it with the database, detecting gene mutations that are unique to a particular type of leukemia."

  13. what is a "strain" of leukemia? by neurocutie · · Score: 1

    Leukemia is not a virus, or an animal or plant species...
    Perhaps they mean "types" of leukemia, but it is hard to imagine that her docs missed that. Oh and so they just decided to "treat both strains" of leukemia and now she's great! something doesn't sound right here...

    1. Re:what is a "strain" of leukemia? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Cell lines can't have genetically determined strains? Not that I'm a biologist but it makes sense to me. "Types" definitely do not seem to be the thing in question here. My impression is that the genetics of those cells has gone bad in two different ways separately from each other or something like that.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:what is a "strain" of leukemia? by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 2

      Shitty reporting doesn't mean facts aren't facts. Be suspicious after reading the peer reviewed paper, or a statement directly from the team. Critique of a Dashslot summary is no art form...

  14. Let's see a machine get it *wrong*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Human superiority.

    1. Re:Let's see a machine get it *wrong*. by geekmux · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Human superiority.

      Human superiority has brought unending amounts of narcissistic greed.

      Fuck human superiority. The truly superior human is the one who is humble enough to know when they are outmatched. We would all still be walking around with an abacus and riding horses with your mentality, fearful of anything that might make humans look weak or slow.

    2. Re:Let's see a machine get it *wrong*. by Excelcia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is human superiority. Watson isn't hard AI. It's not even soft AI. It's an expert system. It's a tool, like an x-ray or an MRI. Feed in genomic sequence, out pops matches with different strains of leukemia. It's a tool that will be excellent for fringe cases - when a doctor sees fifty cases that fit inside the bell curve, every case looks like one that should fit inside the bell curve. Especially if it requires actually doing something to investigate.

      Humans will never "compete" with a computer on its own turf. And people shouldn't feel like we have to try. Being less able to win at chess or come up with a fringe diagnosis than a computer is a win for human engineering and ingenuity. Feeling like humans have lost something by this is like feeling like we've lost something because we can't see into the x-ray bands to tell if someone's bones are broken.

      We build tools to expand our abilities, and that is what this is. Don't make it to be more or less than it is. It is a feat of human engineering and a tribute to those that built it. It isn't a symbol that humans are less capable or diminished.

    3. Re:Let's see a machine get it *wrong*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Human superiority.

      Human superiority has brought unending amounts of narcissistic greed.

      Fuck human superiority. The truly superior human is the one who is humble enough to know when they are outmatched. We would all still be walking around with an abacus and riding horses with your mentality, fearful of anything that might make humans look weak or slow.

      Humans ARE slow compared to horses.

    4. Re:Let's see a machine get it *wrong*. by geekmux · · Score: 1

      This is human superiority. Watson isn't hard AI. It's not even soft AI. It's an expert system. It's a tool, like an x-ray or an MRI. Feed in genomic sequence, out pops matches with different strains of leukemia. It's a tool that will be excellent for fringe cases - when a doctor sees fifty cases that fit inside the bell curve, every case looks like one that should fit inside the bell curve. Especially if it requires actually doing something to investigate.

      Humans will never "compete" with a computer on its own turf. And people shouldn't feel like we have to try. Being less able to win at chess or come up with a fringe diagnosis than a computer is a win for human engineering and ingenuity. Feeling like humans have lost something by this is like feeling like we've lost something because we can't see into the x-ray bands to tell if someone's bones are broken.

      We build tools to expand our abilities, and that is what this is. Don't make it to be more or less than it is. It is a feat of human engineering and a tribute to those that built it. It isn't a symbol that humans are less capable or diminished.

      Regarding my point about greed, when you find our capitalistic society can't manage to figure out how to employ the millions of humans that will find themselves obsolete in every way in the next few decades due to automation and AI, let's see how "superior" the average lifestyle is when humans are permanently part of the welfare state.

      Greed will ensure a welfare stipend, and not a penny more.

    5. Re:Let's see a machine get it *wrong*. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Humans ARE slow compared to horses.

      Not hung as well, either. So there's TWO things.

  15. when there are really 2 problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think this will end up being one of strengths of computer diagnosis.

    I've observed a similar situation in computer repair. Nearly anyone with a bit of experience can troubleshoot an issue, but when there are two problems with effects that overlap most people struggle to figure it out what is going on. Most 2+ issue examples I've seen others tackle end up either 1) going unsolved, 2) deferring to an expert (or studying until they become expert in the subject), 3) and lastly spending a ridiculous amount of time on trial & error until nearly every effort has been exhausted and finally something that can be observed changes for the better.

    Whereas an algorithm will have no issue with it ( 30% change of A, 60% B, and 76% A & B). This sort of thing won't replace humans, but when used as a tool by a human it will get you much farther than doing it by hand.

  16. It's a very intelligent machine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You swallow a chess piece and it can tell you how many moves left till checkmate.

    1. Re:It's a very intelligent machine by hidflect · · Score: 1

      Well done. Sounds like a gag from a '50's TV show...

  17. Moores Law by beckett · · Score: 2

    How much does it cost?

    Wait 18 months. If it's not cheap enough "out-of-pocket", then wait another iteration until the tech is ubiquitous.

    How much does it cost?

    And for fucks sake, get your country single payer, universal health coverage already.

    1. Re:Moores Law by yuriklastalov · · Score: 2

      I, too, want Donald Trump to pick who is in charge of the health system. What could possibly go wrong? And just think about the endless arguments about whether the single payer should cover things like birth control or abortions. Really though, isn't it just time for the government to openly declare us subjects, and quit pussy footing around pretending it doesn't own us, mind, body, and soul?

    2. Re:Moores Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FUCK YOU you quisling! Here in America, Republicans courgageously protect our FREEDOM to go into medical debt and die in the gutter

  18. No, just the one where the humans win. by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    Humans don't get practice sessions, neither should Watson.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
    1. Re:No, just the one where the humans win. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Humans DO get practice sessions.

      What makes you think they don't.

      Every teaching hospital I've been in has practice sessions with six to eight students going around with the instructor. The instructor will ask the patient questions, then ask the students what they think. Then ask the students "What about..." questions if they are off the mark. When the session is done, the supervising doctor will add a note to the patients treatment - not the student.

      That is practice.

      The problem is that the human doctors don't have access to tens of thousands of cases as a student.

      Watson does.

  19. N=1, no details by nbauman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's a 60-year-old woman in Tokyo. She was at the University of Tokyo. She had been diagnosed with leukemia six years ago. She was living, but not healthy. So the University of Tokyo ran her genomic sequence through Watson and it was able to ascertain that they were off by one thing. Actually, she had two strains of leukemia. The did treat her and she is healthy.

    This is one anecdote by David Kenny, General Manager of IBM Watson, who has no medical expertise. He's a computer salesman and this is his pitch. Have you ever heard of a computer salesman making a promise that turned out to be an exaggeration?

    This is the kind of story I used to see about miracle cures from vitamins or fad diets or Burzynski's Clinic: a vague description ending in a miraculous cure that is impossible to verify.

    Kenny doesn't even describe the case. She had "leukemia." What kind of leukemia? There are at least 4 major types of leukemia, and many subtypes.

    Some of them have effective treatments, some of them don't.

    Some of them have a median survival of 6 months, some of them have a median survival of 20 years. Since she's been alive for 6 years she doesn't have the most deadly type.

    It looks as if they found a mutation which suggested that one drug would be more effective than another, which is routine these days. You don't need a supercomputer to do that. You do need a randomized, controlled trial to see if using Watson actually leads to better survival than doctors can get without Watson.

    She's healthy? What does "healthy" mean? What does "not healthy" mean? Those aren't medical terms.

    If they're serious about this, publish in a medical journal.

    1. Re:N=1, no details by rmdingler · · Score: 1
      Ever look up something with an internet search? How to fix a leaky sink or overcome a coding obstacle... This is the supercharged version of computer assistance.

      I've been in the doctor's office and had a nurse practitioner google my symptoms. I am a big fan of diagnosticians who are unafraid to ask someone if they don't know.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    2. Re:N=1, no details by nbauman · · Score: 2

      Have you ever looked up a disturbing symptom on the Internet? Have you done it not just once, but several times?

      If you do a thorough search, you'll find that most symptoms have a differential diagnosis that includes cancer. In other words, the problem with Google searches is massive false positives.

      There's a medical student's joke: If your doctor asks you what's wrong with this patient, say, "It's either cancer, an autoimmune disease, or an infection." The joke is that most symptoms could be either cancer, autoimmune disease, or infection.

      The problem with medical diagnosis is that most major diseases have overlapping symptoms. Does this patient have heart failure or lung failure? Does this patient have rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, or ankylosing spondylitis? Or is it Wegener's granulomatosis, which is a medical emergency and can cause blindness?

      I just read an article about lyme disease. One of the big problems with lyme disease is that it starts with an infection. Then the infection is cleared, and you're left with an autoimmune disease. If it's an infection, the way to treat it is with antibiotics. If it's an autoimmune disease, the way to treat it is with drugs like steroids, which turn the immune system down. But if you treat an infection with steroids, the immune system will be less able to fight an infection.

      In New York State (and most states), it's outside the nurses' scope of practice to diagnose disorders. If a nurse diagnoses diseases, she could lose her license. There's a reason for that. Medical students get thousands of hours training seeing patients with different diseases and learning how to diagnose them. Nursing students get hundreds of hours, and their training is not directed at diagnosis. Nurses are pretty smart. They know a lot of biology, chemistry and medicine. But most important, they (usually) know what they don't know.

      My health insurer has a nurse telephone hotline. I've tried it a few times, mostly out of curiosity. One day I had some vague symptoms including dizziness and what could be shortness of breath. (Probably from sitting at my desk all day.) I figured more advice is better. I described my symptoms and she said, you should go to the doctor immediately. Go to your own doctor or the emergency room.

      I said, what's the problem? What should I tell them when I get to the ER?

      She said, you have symptoms of heart failure.

      I said, that's impossible. I walk up 5 flights of stairs every week. How did you come to this conclusion?

      She said she was using a "decision aid."

      I said, what decision aid? I have to tell them when I get to the ER. She was evasive. Finally she admitted that she looked it up on the Internet. I said, where on the Internet? She was even more evasive. I said, is there a blue bar on the top of the page? What does it say in the blue bar?

      She said, "Medscape."

      I said, I write for Medscape. I wouldn't want people to diagnose a disease based on my stories.

      I got one thing out of it. I was able to call my doctor's office and tell them that a nurse had told me to see a doctor immediately. They gave me an appointment immediately.

      I told my doctor, I can climb 5 flights of stairs.

      He laughed and said, if you can climb 5 flights of stairs, you don't have heart failure.

      Conclusion 1: These decision guides and algorithms have been around long before the Internet. I read about them in Scientific American from the early 1970s. The futurists, and computer salesmen, in their irresponsible moments, claimed that they would replace doctors.

      They failed. Computer diagnosis has now achieved its rightful place in medicine as the place for doctors to go when they could use more information. But you can only do that if you have the medical training to understand what you're getting, how the algorithm works, and what it's doing. You need doctors, and sometimes specialists, to see whether the results make sense.

      If you have a man who can climb 5 flights of stairs, a

    3. Re:N=1, no details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      She said, you have symptoms of heart failure.

      I said, that's impossible. I walk up 5 flights of stairs every week. How did you come to this conclusion?

      Wouldn't it have been funny if it was Heart Failure? You'd have been laughing for months!
      The author of the "Complete Book of Running" died from a heart attack while jogging.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    4. Re:N=1, no details by cellocgw · · Score: 2

      Except that you are wrong about your own diagnosis. I have a friend who's a former Olympic rower, and competes in Senior class to this day. About 15 yrs ago he got up one morning and felt extremelydizzy and weak. Med exam revealed a heart valve failure.
      So that's nice you ran up X flights of stairs. It doesn't preclude a heart problem.

      --
      https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
    5. Re:N=1, no details by nbauman · · Score: 1

      If he had a heart valve failure, then he wouldn't be able to walk up 5 flights of stairs.

      My broader point is that the internet is a great additional resource for medical education (it won't replace textbooks and journals, much less lectures and labs).

      But at the end, you need a doctor (sometimes more than one) to decide what the problem is.

      There is a movement now to save money by eliminating doctors and delegating much of their job to nurse practitioners and even computers. They're trying to turn patients into "medical consumers" who are supposed to do their own shopping.

      That's ridiculous. It's giving us second-class health care.

      These triage nurses don't even save money. They have a tendency to tell people to go to the ER.

      That's according to a recent study you can find on the internet.

  20. Scramble for the "OFF" switch by hidflect · · Score: 1

    What happens when Watson comes to the conclusion that single payer health care would save more lives than the current US health system?

    1. Re:Scramble for the "OFF" switch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The insurance companies turn it off. :-)

    2. Re:Scramble for the "OFF" switch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nothing.

      There is no reason people will believe the computer is telling the truth other than they already believe more or less it is the truth. Computers lie so much now we no longer as a culture believe in the magical reasoning machine.

  21. Re:Baggage by hackwrench · · Score: 1

    Yeah, they should do a DNA lookup with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and/or Red Hat, non-exclusive baggage. Gotta get the DNA lookup software from somewhere!

  22. A Tale of Two Companies by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2

    IBM is crowing about saving peoples' lives. Microsoft is crowing about what is probably a couple of people switching from Mac to Surface.

  23. I remember Dr. Watson by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Before the BSOD there was the Dr. Watson error....

  24. impossible to assess without some details by chris_osulliva · · Score: 1

    "...ran her genomic sequence through Watson..." could we maybe get a little detail on that? its sort of a complicated thing to do with a ton of variables