Posted on 02/17/2011 12:46:37 PM PST by SeekAndFind
After conquering puny humans Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and winning a total of $77,147 over three days and two full games on Jeopardy!, IBM's know-it-all new supercomputer is going to med school.
On Wednesday, IBM, along with Nuance Communications Inc. and the Columbia University and University of Maryland medical schools, announced that they are developing Watson as a diagnostic tool that can help doctors identify diseases and recommend treatments. They hope to begin lab tests as early as next year, with real world testing later in 2012.
"What makes Watson unique is that it can rip through massive amounts of information and give a small amount of possible answers with levels of confidence," says Dr. John Kelly, IBM's senior vice president of research.
Doctors have long relied on technology to help them manage patient care — electronically stored patient histories, digital lab results and machines that regulate medication are all commonplace in today's hospitals. Indeed, the first attempt to create a machine that could help diagnose human illness came back in the 1970s, when Stanford University researchers developed MYCIN — a computer designed to indentify different types of bacteria responsible for infections. But even the most up-to-date systems, which were developed in the 1980s, still require physicians to spend costly time typing in test data and patient information, and still only cover a limited number of diseases.
That's why doctors like Eliot Siegel, a professor and vice chair at Maryland's department of diagnostic radiology, says Watson's capabilities are necessary now. Imagine a supercomputer that can not only store and collate patient data but also interpret records in a matter of seconds, analyze additional patient information and research from medical journals and deliver possible diagnoses and treatments, with the probability of each outcome precisely calculated.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
It’s just a cold Dave. I suggest you take the pod out for a spin around the ship.
I don’t understand how a machine can think
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