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IBM Says Watson Health's AI Is Getting Really Good at Diagnosing Cancer (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In deciding on cancer treatment, doctors often get together in a "tumor board" to go over the options. IBM's Watson now sits in on those meetings in a few hospitals, such as in South Korea and India -- and it generally makes the same calls that a human expert would. So says IBM in a series of studies it's presenting this weekend at the ASCO cancer treatment conference in Chicago. "It's not making a diagnosis. That's not what we set out to do," says Andrew Norden of IBM's Watson Health division. "They will run Watson Oncology in a tumor board and sort of get another external opinion." Watson's "concordance rate" -- the degree to which it agrees with human doctors -- ranged from 73% to 96%, depending on the type of cancer (such as colon cancer) and the particular hospital where the study was done (in India, South Korea, and Thailand).
Title: "IBM Says Watson Health's AI Is Getting Really Good at Diagnosing Cancer "
Summary: "It's not making a diagnosis. That's not what we set out to do," says Andrew Norden of IBM's Watson Health division"
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Watson agrees with humans in 73% to 96% of the cases. But who is right when it disagrees, the human doctor or Watson?
Why are they worried about making the same calls as doctors? What they should be doing is (obviously after the fact) comparing it to whether the patient actually had cancer. Nobody cares that Watson might only agree with doctors 73-96% of the time if, overall, it catches more cancers.
In fact, even if it has a comparable success rate but disagrees with doctors that's great because it means it is catching cancers that doctors are likely to miss.
it agrees with those who control the power to disconnect it.
might there not still be a place for humans as middlemen to broker the information to a fellow human?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
star trek had doctors and they had better tech than we do now. someone has to make treatment decisions
*types in "I have a headache*
Google: You have cancer!
Didn't Voyager use an AI doctor who presented as a hologram?
That's one future. Another is the autodoc from Ringworld, Elysium and Passengers. Just climb your sick self in, shut the lid, and the machine fixes you right up.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
IBM needs to up their game because WebMD has been diagnosing me with cancer for years. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And soon it will put doctors out of business. they have a union to stop that.
Diagnosis requires knowing what questions to ask. If you rely on patient-reported symptoms and lifestyle questions, you're going to have a lot of misdiagnoses. Even if you run a battery of tests, you'll have so many false positives that it's hard to make out what's going on. A standard blood panel has more than 20 tests, so at least one of them is likely to be outside the 95%-confidence "normal" range even in a healthy patient.
AI isn't going to help with surgery; as yet robotics is only useful in very controlled environments, and almost no surgery goes exactly the same way twice.
It isn't going to help with post-op care; people have complex needs that can't be met by machines.
I can see it helping with imaging; spotting anomalies in scans and even doing scans in an automated fashion. There's a skill to positioning a patient to get a clear scan that I don't believe a machine could easily replace, though.
It could certainly help keeping track of things during procedures. Checklists WORK, and having a computer keep track of things for you would be useful. The number of stupid mistakes that would be caught by an always-alert computer is frightening. Similarly, an electronic device that could reliably regulate patients taking their meds would be invaluable; especially if it provided that data to their physician.
In short: there are plenty of areas where automation would free up doctors time, or (as in this case) provide a second opinion. Those things are useful no matter how many doctors you have.
AI could help cure cancer by making better treatment decisions. This might especially be useful in situations where a patient doesn't have access to the full range of medical expertise found in a major teaching hospital.
There are a lot of under-served areas even in the US. Over the last decade there has been a movement of American hospitals out of low-income areas to places with healthier, more affluent patients. In the past five years rural areas have been especially strongly hit, particularly in states that rejected Medicaid expansion. The five hardest hit states were Alabama (5 rural hospitals closed), Georgia (6), Mississippi (5), Tennessee (8), and Texas (13).
The US in aggregate has recovered from the Great Recession, but if you break the country down by rural/small town vs. metro areas, the recovery never happened in most rural areas.
The disparities are frankly shocking. Massachusetts has 315 doctors 100,000 population and 95.6% of residents have health insurance. Georgia has 180 doctors/ 100,000 and an insurance rate of 80.3%. In Texas 24% of the population is uninsured which probably accounts for the horrific rate of rural hospital closures there.
Well before this kind of technology is something you'd ever consider relying on this in a place like New York City, there are plenty places where people are lucky to have access to an oncologist, much less a tumor board.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Is Watson just making a yes/no answer or is it actually understanding the reports and suggesting courses of action? Can Watson catch an X-Ray or other report that is total BS or one that is suspicious enough to have been created by a human error? Still this is definitely progress.
A doctor makes 20x what a retail worker makes and is likely easier to automate. Retail workers aren't paid much and can stalk shelves, fix broken things and do a multitude of things. They won't all be replaced by online shopping, I still need my immediate gratification. Doctors though are very high paid and my family doctor only orders tests and prescribes things. Evidently in Canada she spends over half her time doing soul crushing paperwork. There is no reason a computer can't 1) listen to symptoms, 2) run tests, 3) examine the results (order more tests?), 4) decide on a coarse of action 5) check if the patient is getting better 6) evaluate its own diagnostic. Hell my family doctor doesn't do 5 and 6.
Watson agrees with humans in 73% to 96% of the cases. But who is right when it disagrees, the human doctor or Watson?
There are plenty of cancers where there is a philosophical difference in how to approach it surgically and there are questions that make a particular study less applicable in a given circumstance. For example, I know of a stomach cancer case where one doctor advocated strongly for open surgery to excise the tumor and repair the stomach and perform a radical lymphadonectomy followed by chemo and another surgeon who advocated strongly for chemo followed by endoscopic surgery and a more limited lymphadonectomy. There was technically not enough evidence to determine that one course was definitely right or wrong in the given situation compared to the other, so it comes down to a combination of your best guess based on the limited data and which doctor the patient trusts more to do a good surgery.
But there are also lots of decisions where there's a pretty clear choice.
And there are lots of decisions where there is a pretty clear choice, but the doctors make a different choice because they are less familiar with another surgery. And some choices are a function of when you are trained. I knew an amazing orthopedic surgeon in NY who was trained in a different era than modern surgeons and was much more conservative about surgery in the last few decades of his practice than everyone trained more recently. Sometimes there is a reason for that (I know old docs who just had much more training than new ones, and there are operations that it is VERY hard to find someone good enough to do reliably these days) and sometimes they're just used to the standards of a different era.
Real lawyers write in C++
Just climb your sick self in, shut the lid, and the machine fixes you right up.
. . . and if it can't fix you up, you are already right there in your coffin, ready to be buried . . . or shipped to the Soylent Green factory.
This definitely would streamline the whole process.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Isn't it reasonable to request the Slashdot editors to update the title and add an "EDIT: ...â disclaimer to the summary? The title outright contradicts the summary.
It's not like Slashdot has printed millions of copies of a newspaper, it's not an epic task to change this.
I lament that there don't seem to be any online news sources that do the minimum to notice or correct their mistakes, whether directly in-place or as a retraction / correction after the fact.
Please prove me wrong Slashdot!
Are you living the digital age?