IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

Re:IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare by booruguru on Saturday February 09, 2013 @11:00AM (#5192857)

This product is essentially a search engine. Doctors refer to medical texts all of time, this IBM tool is simply making it easier (and faster) to access the right information using plain English queries. It's not like we're going to replace doctors with computer kiosks...well, at least not until they work out some of the bugs.

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Re:IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare by rtkwe on Saturday February 09, 2013 @12:45PM (#5193198)

It's more than a search engine it aggregates the information from say 10 different studies or cases about a disease into a set of information which it then compares against the current case the doctor is looking at. At that point it posits some diagnoses or some treatments.

Calling it a search engine is pretty dismissive.

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Re:IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare by booruguru on Saturday February 09, 2013 @02:39PM (#5193700)

I'm wasn't being dismissive. I'm not suggesting what IBM has accomplished is trivial... what I'm saying is, doctors can't use Watson to do their job; it's just another diagnostic resource... As opposed to being a harbinger of the coming robopocalyse (as some people seem to be suggesting)

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Re:IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare by xyzzy123 on Sunday February 10, 2013 @02:44AM (#5195753)

I agree, this is a lot more than a search engine. But I guess that over time it will have to deal with the same issues that search engines do.

Think drug company or test procedure journal spam, designed to SEO Watson into making specific decisions or recommendations.

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Re:IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare by rtkwe on Monday February 11, 2013 @12:05AM (#5199479)

Ideally if Watson were able to parse documents well enough they would have to actively lie in order to twist Watson that way. Also a lot of what goes into Watson is peer reviewed in the medical field iirc so there's also that buffer.

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Re:IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare by mkr-hn on Saturday February 09, 2013 @01:49PM (#5193491)

Have you used Google recently?

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Re:IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare by rtkwe on Saturday February 09, 2013 @11:24PM (#5195407)

For all the grand magic that Google works behind the scenes it falls pretty short of the work that Watson does.

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Re:IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare by brianpan on Saturday February 09, 2013 @03:02PM (#5193805)

Our doctors certainly already do.

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