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A comment on IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student. Parent comment

Re:IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student by jurjenh on Thursday May 26, 2011 @07:22PM (#2589810)
I read your statement to assume that entering data into Watson is going to take longer than "entering" that same data into your GP. How did data entry for Jeopardy work?

This would mean that the main issue in adoption of Dr Watson (Hmmm, haven't I heard that name before?) would be the data entry - obviously a pain point in many digital services. If an effective answer is found, and I would suspect that this should soon happen, then the argument becomes more a matter of whether you prefer a subjective opinion from your GP (based on his/her current thought processes / focus) or an objective one from a digital process.

I think I'd prefer the digital process, once the main issues are ironed out.

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Re:IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student by nradov on Thursday May 26, 2011 @07:46PM (#2589872)
Don't hold your breath. This has been an area of active work by many of us for decades. We have some systems that work reasonably well for a few limited cases but the general case of clinical data entry won't be solved any time soon. It's a genuinely hard problem that those without experience in the domain tend to underestimate.

Doctors have only a few minutes for most patient encounters. They simply have no extra time to do data entry. You can delegate some of that work to clerical staff or allied health but there are limits to what they can do, and they don't work for free either.

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Re:IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student by cynest on Thursday May 26, 2011 @07:24PM (#2589817)
Iirc, Watson used voice input.
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Re:IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student by younata on Thursday May 26, 2011 @07:33PM (#2589840)
incorrect, watson was fed a text of the question over ethernet right after Trebek finished reading the question.
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Re:IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student by ugh on Thursday May 26, 2011 @09:04PM (#2590048)
Also incorrect, Watson was fed the question as soon as it was revealed. He didn’t – just like the humans – have to wait until Trebek finished to read the question.
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