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March 26, 2012 By News Staff
Answer: the latest in oncology research
IBM and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said last week that they will add both the latest in oncology research and the hospital's accumulated experience to Watson's knowledge base, according to physorg.com -- and they'll keep updating it. This likely will help the hospital diagnose and treat cancer more quickly, accurately and personally.
In February 2011, On Monday, Feb. 14, Watson competed on Jeopardy, against the two most successful and celebrated contestants.
The supercomputer is the result of four years of work by 25 IBM research scientists who set out to accomplish a grand challenge: Build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence.
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As good as Watson was, and I was impressed watched every minute of it, I would still ask for a second opinion. Every so often it would come up with a bone-headed answer. It would certainly keep a doctor from overlooking some obvious clues. It had a weighted system of decision making and would give it the ability to ignore symptoms with no bearing on the primary illness.
In all matters computing, I subscribe to the old axiom, "Garbage in, garbage out." There is still so, so much we do not understand about the fundamental biological processes of the human body and disease that we cannot possibly hope to put enough correct, and with sufficient detail, information to reliably diagnose disease in the absence of human imagination, creativity, and "intuition". It would be a very important tool to suggest things the human doctors may have overlooked and to provide possible alternative diagnoses that could be ruled out with additional testing, but I would not rely soley on Watson or any other computer system for a definitive diagnosis.