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

"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."

Comments

DNA Sequencing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"You've got leprosy, goodbye."

[Z00L00K]

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