If a doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City asks the question about best treatment for a patient’s stage-three breast cancer, he'll soon be talking to Watson, a supercomputer that combines natural language processing with machine learning.
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| Doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City |
The computer, which is best-known for the way it crushed its human competition on "Jeopardy," can interpret spoken queries and then uses statistical analysis to deliver evidence-based statistically-ranked responses. The two organizations, IBM and Memorial Sloan-Kettering, are still discussing terms of the partnership, but the big idea is to create an online decision-support service with the smarts of Watson and the clinical insights of Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
Watson is architected to store and analyze data in parallel and high-speed. As an example, I can read (but not remember) 1 page of data in 3 minutes, while Watson can read and memorize all 200 million pages of data in three seconds.
The Watson version being designed for the hospital works similarly to the way it played "Jeopardy." When it is asked a question, it will provide suggestions -- one in which Watson feels most confident. and then some strong alternatives.
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| Watson competing against Ken Jenning and Brad Rutter at Jepardy! Game |
However, Memorial Sloan-Kettering is feeding Watson more information than it got on "Jeopardy," and that comes in the way of patients' medical backgrounds. Watson is learning the hospital's advanced electronic medical records system, making it even smarter and able to make very strong recommendations based on patients' backgrounds. IBM and Memorial Sloan-Kettering are working to feed Watson loads of oncology information. Both expect it to be a process that will evolve over the next year.
"We are going to work with the machine and teach the machine how to make medical decisions," Memorial's Dr. Larry Norton told ABC News. "It's going to take not only molecular disease and clinical research findings into account but also the patients' social and psychological situations and patients' expressed wishes, lifestyle -- all that comes into play when making a high quality medical decision."
Sloan-Kettering and IBM are already developing the first applications using Watson related to lung, breast and prostate cancers, and aim to begin piloting the solutions to some oncologists in late 2012, with wider distribution planned for late 2013.
Wellpoint, an insurance company, also hired Watson last year to guide treatment decisions for members. The first Watson deployment at WellPoint is underway now with nurses who manage complex patient cases and review treatment requests from medical providers. See my earlier blog on "Watson Debuts for Healthcare".
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