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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."
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.
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.
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.