IBM's Watson Supercomputer May Soon Be The Best Doctor In The World
"Watson, the supercomputer that is now the world Jeopardy champion, basically went to med school after it won Jeopardy," MIT's Andrew McAfee, coauthor of The Second Machine Age, said recently in an interview with Smart Planet. "I'm convinced that if it's not already the world's best diagnostician, it will be soon."
Watson is already capable of storing far more medical information than doctors, and unlike humans, its decisions are all evidence-based and free of cognitive biases and overconfidence. As IBM scientists continue to train Watson to apply its vast stores of knowledge to actual medical decision-making, it's likely just a matter of time before its diagnostic performance surpasses that of even the sharpest doctors.
Back in 2011, McAfee wrote on his blog about why a diagnosis from "Dr. Watson" would be a gamechanger:
An April study estimated that as many as 1 in 20 U.S. adults are misdiagnosed by their human doctors each year, so it's an area ripe for improvement and competition.
That's one reason IBM has been pumping Watson full of medical knowledge - a subject area that's actually significantly more contained than "all the world's general knowledge," which is what Watson tried to learn for Jeopardy.
Watson has "read" dozens of textbooks, all of PubMed and Medline (two massive databases of medical journals), and thousands of patient records from Memorial Sloan Kettering. All together, "Watson has analyzed 605,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text, 25,000 training cases and had the assist of 14,700 clinician hours fine-tuning its decision accuracy," Forbes reported in 2013.
And it's getting "smarter" every year. So how would Dr. Watson work in practice? Here's how IBM describes the process:
The supercomputer's potential is huge, but - as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year - currently "just a handful of customers are using Watson in their daily business," and it's far from performing at the level and in the range of domains that should be possible in the future.
So far, IBM's most high-profile AI partnerships are with MD Anderson Cancer Center, where Watson helps recommend leukemia treatments, and WellPoint, where Watson helps the insurer evaluate doctors' treatment plans.
Wellpoint, currently the exclusive reseller for Dr. Watson, has claimed that the system is already significantly better than human doctors at diagnosing lung cancer.
Watson is not yet able to leverage all the information it has absorbed, so it still has a ways to go before it catches up with our best human diagnosticians, whose versatility and agility is difficult to match. But Watson's ability to learn, analyze, and apply knowledge suggests that it will get there - eventually.
"If and when Dr. Watson gets as good at diagnosis as Watson is at Jeopardy! I want it as my primary care physician," McAfee wrote, back in 2011.
That day may come sooner than we imagined.