IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student

Re:IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student by CobraKai on Thursday May 26, 2011 @10:23PM (#2590224)

As a specialist, I have to say: This makes me very glad I'm not a primary care provider. The doctors of the future will be evaluated on bedside manner and interpersonal skills - not on diagnostic ability or knowledge, because they'll all have access to Watson. Which is scary because smooth talking idiots can get into medical school, but get rapidly weeded out in the real world. It scares me that stupidity can hide behind this computing beast. And there will be situations where Watson cannot help (emergencies) where a doctor and his smarts are all he has to go by.

If Watson makes a wrong diagnoses and a patient dies, who will be responsible? The doctor? IBM? All it would take is one or two incorrect diagnoses leading to large malpractice suits to really put the medical profession on edge about this. Granted, many incompetent practitioners exist out there making all kinds of dangerous decisions, but this would really stick out in the public eye.

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Re:IBM’s Watson Now A Second-Year Med Student by arohner on Friday May 27, 2011 @12:13AM (#2590405)

You don't really have to get the diagnosis correct, you just have to get the error bars correct, and then disclose all of that.

"Watson believes the best treatment is Foo. It has an X% chance of working, with a confidence interval of Y. The second most likely diagnosis is Bar, with an expected loss of Z if the diagnosis is incorrect. Which would you like to do?"

Besides, several specialties are already essentially classifiers (radiologists, anesthesiologists). If machines can't beat humans at classifying cancer from lung scans, they're not far behind. By the time Watson is in production, I bet a computer will be replacing radiologists already.

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