WATSON, ARE YOU THERE ?

WATSON, What is the correct answer ? Your patient is in ‘JEOPARDY’

Cleveland Clinic is the latest health care organization to work with IBM Corp. to enhance the capabilities of the Watson supercomputer. The clinic is seeking ways that Watson can support medical training.
Watson has accumulated knowledge of the medical field through its work with other health care organizations. Medical students at Cleveland Clinic will work with the supercomputer to further define its “Deep Question Answering” technology for medical purposes.
Medical students will use Watson to try to resolve challenging cases in hypothetical clinical simulations. Students will learn how to navigate content from Watson, consider hypotheses and find evidence to support answers, diagnoses and treatment options. The students also will be grading Watson’s performance to improve its language and domain analysis capabilities. “The collaboration will also focus on leveraging Watson to process an electronic medical record based on a deep semantic understanding of the content within an EMR,” according to IBM.
The expectation is that students will learn how to focus on critical thinking skills and leveraging information tools, while Watson will get smarter at medical language and assembling chains of evidence from available content.
Other organizations working with IBM to commercialize Watson capabilities include:
* Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, to develop an oncology decision support system taking advantage of its own molecular and genomic databases, and its repository of cancer cases histories;
* Nuance Communications, Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, to embed Nuance’s natural language processing technology to enable a computer to read and understand text and abstract data; and
* Insurer WellPoint Inc. and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, to use data from patient medical histories, recent test results, recent treatment protocols and new research findings to help physicians identify best treatment choices.
More information on Watson is available here.