The trainee was sequentially presented the details of a fictitious patient: there’s an eye problem; vision is blurred; the family, living in Connecticut, has a history of arthritis. The trainee’s initial response was uveitis. More clues and the diagnosis was changed to Behcet’s disease until finally the trainee settled on Lyme disease. How sure was this seemingly hasty student of medicine? Seventy-three percent sure.
Medical trainees and doctors are not typically in the habit of quantifying their assessments with such Commander Data-like precision, but this trainee happens to share more qualities with the Star Trek android than the rest of the medical staff. Following its resounding victory on Jeopardy!, IBM’s Watson has been working hard to learn as much about medicine as it can with a steady diet of medical textbooks and healthcare journals. The mock case described above was part of a recent demonstration to the Associated Press showing just how much Watson has learned. The robot’s diagnosis was correct and it identified a link between symptom and cause that was “not common,” as one participating physician called it. After being told the patient was pregnant and allergic to penicillin, Watson suggested treating her with cefuroxine. Its human colleagues agreed. The demonstration was a success, and it is the hope of IBM and many medical professionals that Watson will one day soon lend doctors a helping hand as they perform their daily rounds.
How Watson Works: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/robots/man-made-minds-take-on-isaac-newton-at-world-science-festival-2011?click=pm_news#fbIndex1
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