After defeating the two top humans contenders at Jeopardy, the Watson supercomputer will soon be commercially available to doctors and health insurance providers through software designed to tailor treatment and coverage, AP reports.
The computer was always meant for medical applications, according to Casey Johnston at Ars Technica,who cited a panel on Watson where Dr. Chris Welty, a member of Watson's algorithms team, said that it could be used in helping to diagnose medical conditions. Watson has also been educated like a medical student-- clinicians and tech experts from WellPoint, an insurance provider, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center spent thousands of hours teaching Watson to process and interpret complex clinical information, and would correct it if it answered wrong when quizzed.
Two applications have emerged-- for doctors treating cancer patients, Watson has crunched a database of over 600,00 pieces of medical evidence, 1.5 million patient records, 1,500 lung cancer cases from Sloan-Kettering records and 2 million pages of text from journals, textbooks and treatment guidelines. Doctors can use a tablet or a computer to compare patient records with the existing data, and Watson will recommend treatment based on effectiveness and possibility of success. The Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and WestMed in Westchester County are both due to adopt this program.
The insurance program will help insurers decide what treatments should be authorized for payment. WellPoint is already using the insurance application in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Wisconsin. It will be selling both applications, and has a contract with IBM to compensate the company.
The price of these applications have yet to be determined, but because a computer can see trends and patterns in immense amounts of data that humans aren't able to process individually, Watson could be a huge asset in any medical field.
"Every doctor knows they cannot keep up with hundreds of new articles but every physician wants to be right and this is a way of facilitating that," Samuel Nussbaum, chief medical officer at WellPoint, told AP.
Manoj Saxena, IBM general manager, said that Watson will not be determining treatment-- only expediting the process for oncologists by saving them the effort of personally having to sort through reams of patient data. Compared to its performance in 2011, IBM has stated that Watson's performance has improved by 240 percent.
