IBM Watson Fights Cancer in 2012
January 31, 2012
All Things D recently reported on IBM’s new super computer Watson in the article “Seven Questions With IBM’s Manoj Saxena About Watson and Cancer.”
According to the article, IBM is planning on using Watson as a reference tool to assist human physicians in the treatment of breast, lung and colon cancer.
The write up provides readers with the text from an interview between All Things D and Manoj Saxena, general manager of the Watson program at IBM, to talk about what Watson will — and won’t — be doing in helping doctors treat humans with cancer, and what that might mean for the future of medicine.
In response to the question, will Watson be directly involved in treatment? Saxena replied:
Watson doesn’t make the decisions. It’s a physician’s assistant. But before it becomes that, it has a lot to learn. Out of the box, Watson has the knowledge of a first-year medical resident. That is where it’s at today. With Cedars-Sinai and Wellpoint, we’re going to teach it all about cancer during the next six months.
Watson still has a lot to learn to be able to be utilized to solve the problem of cancer. After utilizing the super computer in the medical field, IBM plans to apply Watson to financial services. We look forward to more public relations about Watson, the smart search system. It would be interesting to have an online demonstration using the IBM patent corpus or Wikipedia content. Talk is one thing. Test queries are quite another.
Jasmine Ashton, January 31, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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