Greenbeard
Gold Member
Everyone's favorite Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer has a new gig: Wellpoint is bankrolling Watson's new career as a clinical decision support tool at Cedars-Sinai's Samuel Oschin Cancer Center:
Doctors at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute will be the first to use the technology, IBM said, and they will help the computer company make tweaks to the system the first commercial application of the computer since its "Jeopardy!" debut early this year.
Watson, which can process information from 200 million pages of literature in three seconds, will provide doctors with guidance on diagnoses and treatments, IBM says.
The hope is that the technology will be able to comb through patient medical histories, medical journals and clinical trials to provide appropriate treatments, said Manoj Saxena, general manager of IBM's Watson Solutions unit.
With more and more hospitals keeping electronic records on patients, Watson represents a natural next step, said Stanford University medical information technology specialist Dr. Atul Butte, a pediatric endocrinologist.
Butte said that previous attempts to incorporate artificial intelligence technology in medicine were unsuccessful but that now may be the right time for Watson.
"I think it's a huge step forward," Butte said. "What's going to be different this time is that Watson can really take advantage of data."