The Work with “Watson” Continues

My last blog entry reported on the future use of the Watson computing system  to help doctors diagnose and treat their patients.  Watson is the supercomputer, developed by IBM, which beat the 2 Jeopardy super-champions in February.  Well, a recent AP article reports that the work with Watson is still ongoing.  It is being “fed” a diet of medical textbooks and healthcare related journals.  Medical students are “asking” it sample questions to help train it.  In the future it may be linked to electronic health records.  Dr. Herbert Chase, a medical school professor at Columbia University, thinks that Watson should also be linked to personal blogs from medical websites.  He himself  learned from a blog (and not from his doctor!) that Lipitor may cause insomnia.  The hope is that Watson will use this type of anecdotal information, along with all the medical textbook/journal information that it has been programmed with, to suggest a patient’s diagnosis.  And  not just one diagnosis, but a list of probable diagnoses.  Watson will rank these possible diagnoses in order of  its confidence in each one.  Dr. Chase favors this approach, "In medicine, we don't want one answer, we want a list of options". 

It is fairly impossible for any doctor to know everything medical - to wade through all the vast amounts of medical information that is available AND to keep up with the latest cutting-edge information.  This is how Watson can be most useful, in helping the doctor deal with information overload.  As a supercomputer, it can sort through, process, and “digest” all of this information and quickly come up with the most likely diagnosis within its list of possible diagnoses.  Watson’s treatment module works the same way as the diagnostic one plus it will “know” the latest treatment guidelines.  Keep in mind, though, that Watson is not being developed to take the place of the patient's doctor.  He is the one to decide on the diagnosis and the best treatment for his patient, Watson is just helping him make his decision.  As Dr. Chase said “You [the doctor] have to match the right treatment with each unique patient”.

How widely Watson will be used by the medical profession obviously depends on how much the system costs and how much the doctor or the hospital can afford.  Dan Pelino, general manager for global health care at IBM, said that his clients won’t have to buy the complete Watson system to reap benefits from  Watson.  And he suggests possible uses of the system:

"--- Allowing a doctor to connect to Watson’s database by speaking into a hand-held device.

---Serving as a repository for the most advanced research in cancer or other fields.

---Providing an always-available second opinion." 

But wait, Watson is not alone in the computerized diagnostic field.  The AP article points out that Watson already has one competitor on the market.  This system, a medical database named Isabel, has been available for 10 years.  Jason Maude of Isabel Healthcare, the developer of Isabel, said that prices for using the database range from a few thousand dollars a year for a family practice to up to $400,000 for a health system.  Pelino, the IBM healthcare manager, counters by saying that the advantages of Watson over Isabel is that the former is much faster and is better at understanding non-medical terms than the later.  However, if the price for Watson is a lot more expensive than Isabel, some practitioners may choose slower and cheaper over faster but more expensive.  It will certainly be interesting to see what develops with Watson and Isabel and any other future diagnostic  supercomputers.