Watson’s Next Move: The Medical Industry

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Watson’s Next Move: The Medical Industry

After wowing viewers and technophiles alike during that masterful
Jeopardy appearance, IBM’s Watson and its incredible language-
comprehension abilities will be targeted towards the assisting the
medical industry.


Now that IBM is finished showing off Watson’s ability to the world,
and perhaps scaring some of us who grew up watching the Terminator
movies, Watson’s celebrity will not be used in vain. Clearly, making
a Kardashian-esqe computer -- that is, famous for being famous, but
overall usefulness is negligble -- was not IBM’s goal as plans for
Watson’s capabilities have been made public.


Instead of keeping Watson on the game-show circuit, IBM’s new
superstar will be joining forces with Nuance Healthcare’s speech-
recognition solution in order to make the life of physicians an easier
undertaking. Combining these language-comprehension technologies will
assist the diagnosis process, if, for nothing else, by making research
process faster.








Watson’s considerable reaction-time will clearly come into play
here. TechNewsWorld has more:


"There's a tremendous amount of medical information for physicians to
search, process and sort, and Watson provides a powerful way to do all
that automatically," [Peter Durlach, senior healthcare marketing and
product strategy vice president at Nuance] said.



"Watson has the potential to help doctors reduce the time needed to
evaluate and determine the correct diagnosis for a patient," noted
Herbert Chase, M.D., professor of clinical medicine at Columbia
University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

For those of you who are concerned Watson might “replace” the human
element of the medical industry, or if Watson makes a mistake,
something it did during the Jeopardy run, these fears appear to be
unfounded, at least for now. TNW makes the point that ego possessed
by doctors will make overruling Watson’s recommendations an easy
thing.


One does wonder, however, if a dependence on Watson’s vast
computational power will form. Considering the potential workload
being reduced, giving in to the seduction would be tempting.


Of course, another issue of concern is propagation of the Watson
technology. How many hospitals/doctors will have access to it? Will
the computing po...



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