IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer as a Revolution in Cancer Care. It's Nowhere Close (statnews.com)

IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world three years ago. But is it really doing its job? Not so much. An investigation by Stat found that the supercomputer isn't living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM's goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care. From the report: The interviews suggest that IBM, in its rush to bolster flagging revenue, unleashed a product without fully assessing the challenges of deploying it in hospitals globally. While it has emphatically marketed Watson for cancer care, IBM hasn't published any scientific papers demonstrating how the technology affects physicians and patients. As a result, its flaws are getting exposed on the front lines of care by doctors and researchers who say that the system, while promising in some respects, remains undeveloped. [...] Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company's claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, "even new approaches" to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn't create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.

Comments

Re:Greed rules all.

[jedidiah]

> The clueless doc at General Hospital doesn't even figure into this. If a patient has a complex / rare / difficult cancer they get referred to a regional cancer center.

Perhaps in your ideal TV world it does. In the real world, this quite often does not happen.

The problem with a rare cancer is KNOWING to look for it. If you don't KNOW what you're looking for, then it's hard to find it. THAT is the problem that better knowledge tools can help solve.

Quite often doctors don't know to send you out to the "one of thousands" of oncology clinics for you to get misdiagnosed.

You're really glossing over how hard this is and how often it gets botched even by people that call themselves oncologists.

People don't just go to places like Mayo just because of the name recognition.