IBM Introduces Two New Watson Projects for the Medical Field

brownix · October 17, 2013

http://www.dailytech.com/IBM+Introduces+Two+New+Watson+Projects+for+the+Medical+Field/article33555.htm

IBM announced two new Watson projects aimed to specifically help the medical sector: “WatsonPaths” and “Watson EMR Assistant." IBM collaborated with brilliant minds at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University to make the projects possible.

WatsonPaths shows Watson's course of thinking, from the initial question to how it arrives at an answer. In between is Watson uses information from reference materials, clinical guidelines and medical journals to calculate conclusions that either support or refute a set of hypotheses -- just like human thinking.

The point of WatsonPaths is to help medical professionals look at new ways of consuming medical information and thinking to arrive at the best treatment options. IBM also said that it could eventually help medical students learn how to search the latest medical information quickly and study critical reasoning pathways.

As for Watson EMR Assistant, it allows for a quicker and more thorough understanding of a patient’s electronic medical records. EMRs can be very dense and contain too much information to read in a short period of time, but Watson EMR Assistant takes in the EMR data and makes sense of it all to create a complete analysis much quicker than a human doctor can.

The doctor can then use Watson EMR Assistant to make quick and accurate medical diagnoses.

"On 'Jeopardy!' it was not necessarily critical to know how Watson arrived at its answer. But doctors or domain experts in any field will want to understand what information sources Watson consulted, what logic it applied and what inferences it made in arriving at a recommendation,” said Eric Brown, IBM Research Director of Watson Technologies. “Through our research collaboration with Cleveland Clinic, we've been able to significantly advance technologies that Watson can leverage to handle more and more complex problems in real time and partner with medical experts in a much more intuitive fashion. These are breakthrough technologies intended to assist future versions of Watson products."

Overall, the projects have improved Watson's cognitive computing abilities for a more "natural" interaction between Watson and medical staff.

Watson competed with human contestants on "Jeopardy!" back in 2011. A little later, IBM thought about using Watson's DeepQA software to answer sales questions about the company through telemarketing calls.