Rumored to have completed med school in two years, Watson is ready to fight cancer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, specializing in leukemia. The news comes on the wake of recent announcements that IBM was establishing the Watson Health Cloud cognitive computing platform and touting Watson as a genetics counselor who could address increased risk of breast cancer.
According to Ariana Eunjung Cha writing in the Washington Post, Watson’s strong suits are a photographic memory for thousands of relevant journal articles and the ability to summarize patient records. Cha quotes Candida Vitale, an MD from Italy who works with Watson at MD Anderson, as saying, “I was surprised. Even if you work all night, it would be impossible to be able to put this much information together like that.”
Watson’s new endeavor, Cha writes, follows stints as Jeopardy! Champion, hotel concierge, and cookbook author. With Watson working as a cancer specialist, she writes, “The idea is to use Watson’s increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence to find personalized treatments for every cancer patient by comparing disease and treatment histories, genetic data, scans, and symptoms against the vast universe of medical knowledge.”
Watson can do in minutes what humans can do in months—thereby democratizing medical treatment. Cha quotes Lynda Chin, a physician-scientist and associate vice chancellor for the University of Texas system who is overseeing the Watson project at MD Anderson, as saying, “I see technology like this as a way to really break free from our current health-care system, which is very much limited by the community providers. If you want expert care you have to go to an expert center, but there are never enough of those to go around.”
One fear is that Watson is coming to take the jobs of human doctors. But, according to Cha, Iltifat Husain, an assistant professor at the Wake Forest School of Medicine who directs a mobile app curriculum, isn’t worried. Cha quotes Husain as saying, “There are a lot of things you can deduce by what a patient is not telling you, how they interact with their families, their mood, their mannerisms. They don’t look at the patient as a whole. This is where algorithms fail you.”
