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IBM Watson Reportedly Recommended Cancer Treatments That Were 'Unsafe and Incorrect'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Internal company documents from IBM show that medical experts working with the company's Watson supercomputer found "multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations" when using the software, according to a report from Stat News. According to Stat, those documents provided strong criticism of the Watson for Oncology system, and stated that the "often inaccurate" suggestions made by the product bring up "serious questions about the process for building content and the underlying technology." One example in the documents is the case of a 65-year-old man diagnosed with lung cancer, who also seemed to have severe bleeding. Watson reportedly suggested the man be administered both chemotherapy and the drug "Bevacizumab." But the drug can lead to "severe or fatal hemorrhage," according to a warning on the medication, and therefore shouldn't be given to people with severe bleeding, as Stat points out. A Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center spokesperson told Stat that they believed this recommendation was not given to a real patient, and was just a part of system testing.
According to the report, the documents blame the training provided by IBM engineers and on doctors at MSK, which partnered with IBM in 2012 to train Watson to "think" more like a doctor. The documents state that -- instead of feeding real patient data into the software -- the doctors were reportedly feeding Watson hypothetical patients data, or "synthetic" case data. This would mean it's possible that when other hospitals used the MSK-trained Watson for Oncology, doctors were receiving treatment recommendations guided by MSK doctors' treatment preferences, instead of an AI interpretation of actual patient data. And the results seem to be less than desirable for some doctors.
According to the report, the documents blame the training provided by IBM engineers and on doctors at MSK, which partnered with IBM in 2012 to train Watson to "think" more like a doctor. The documents state that -- instead of feeding real patient data into the software -- the doctors were reportedly feeding Watson hypothetical patients data, or "synthetic" case data. This would mean it's possible that when other hospitals used the MSK-trained Watson for Oncology, doctors were receiving treatment recommendations guided by MSK doctors' treatment preferences, instead of an AI interpretation of actual patient data. And the results seem to be less than desirable for some doctors.
I think the doctors may have be sabotaging Watson as well. The Doctor Industry is about keeping the Doctor person in high regard and high pay.
Med schools make sure the entrance requirements are very high so there isn't an influx of Doctors to lower the price, and the status they demand from the general public, where they think 4 years of med school seems to have them prepared for other specialties as well. Now these are factors of the industry, the individual can be dealt with, but on the whole MD are a very protective of their status.
A system such as Watson which is able to come up with ideas and treatments if worked would be a threat to the specializes of the Doctor. So I expect when building data they have placed a lot of road blocks and problems to prevent the project from being successful.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Cancer is a huge money industry for medicine. This is why the huge focus is on screening / early detection, because those allow tons of unnecessary treatment for perfectly healthy people. People get done with treatment and get told they're in the clear. Everybody is happy and celebrates. Nobody sues for fraud when nothing was wrong in the first place.
https://qz.com/1335348/google-is-building-virtual-agents-to-handle-call-centers-grunt-work/