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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."
"That's one example. Statistically, we're seeing that about one third of the time, Watson is proposing an additional diagnosis."
Reads like an IBM ad.
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.
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.
.. did not know it would pop up so prominently on /.
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.
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.
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
"You've got leprosy, goodbye."
Microsoft will gladly take that money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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...
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.
Humans don't get practice sessions, neither should Watson.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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.
Not every country bills the patients.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
What happens when Watson comes to the conclusion that single payer health care would save more lives than the current US health system?
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.
Well done. Sounds like a gag from a '50's TV show...
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!
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.
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.
IBM is crowing about saving peoples' lives. Microsoft is crowing about what is probably a couple of people switching from Mac to Surface.
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
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.
"...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