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).

Comments

Mixed Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

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"

Re:Mixed Messages

[hey!]

Well, that's the headline editor's fault. As I understand it, a tumor board doesn't diagnose; it makes treatment plan decisions.

Well, that's the headline writer. My understanding is that a tumor board isn't about making a diagnosis, it's about deciding between alternative modes of treatment. If your doctor happens to be a surgical oncologist, a multidisciplinary board is less likely to have a systematic bias toward surgery over chemotherapy.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Who is right?

[manu0601]

Watson agrees with humans in 73% to 96% of the cases. But who is right when it disagrees, the human doctor or Watson?

Re:Who is right?

[PatientZero]

AlphaGo.

Re:Who is right?

[SharpFang]

Cancer.

Re:Who is right?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

And maybe more importantly, if it disagrees with the humans, can we figure out why? This is a problem with a lot of machine learning applications, but there aren't many where understanding the decision-making process is more vital than it is here.

Compare to Truth Not Doctors

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Where does it end?

[WheezyJoe]

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.

IBM is still playing catch-up.

[Gravis Zero]

IBM needs to up their game because WebMD has been diagnosing me with cancer for years. ;)

Re:Put can it cure cancer?

[hey!]

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.