
Watson's Next Feat: Taking on Cancer - tacon
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/06/27/watsons-next-feat-taking-on-cancer/
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Gatsky
I had a go using the Watson cancer decision making system. This was the
experience: Web interface. Log in. Add new patient. Fill in many many
different check boxes/drop down lists about the patient. Some of these seem
irrelevant. Push a button. Treatment recommendations come up. Top
recommendation is reasonable. Evidence summary provided about the
recommendation. This is explicitly marked as being human curated from the MD
Anderson, not generated by Watson. Links to possible clinical trials given -
these were wrong, not applicable to the patient at all.

So in summary, this is really designed for a doctor treating a cancer that
they aren't really used to treating. There is no 'magic' that I could see.
Maybe I used the most simplistic version, but the major limitation seems to be
that it requires very structured input about the patient's case. I can't
indicate for example that there was something unusual about the how the cancer
looked under the microscope, or that the patient has a rare other medical
condition that influences the treatment decision etc. Not surprising, because
these are factors that lack an evidence based recommendation. If you read the
article this is the key point:

"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," she said, "but there
are never enough of those to go around."

This is quite a different goal to 'revolutionising' cancer care, or 'taking
on' cancer. There is clearly a lot of hype... But I laud the effort, it will
likely end up being genuinely useful in the future. At the moment it seems to
be a very thin machine learning layer on top of a highly domain-customised
infrastructure.

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gojomo
If you read 'Watson' as 'whatever changing mix of machine learning techniques
IBM throws at a particular domain', these PR stories make more sense.

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iskander
Is Watson a single fixed codebase or just a branding of multiple loosely
related IBM research projects?

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andrenotgiant
It's a marketing campaign.

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mercurialshark
I just had a conversation with an IBM Watson engineer. It was the worst
professional conversation of my adult/professional life after I asked "is
everything Watson has accomplished so far a PR campaign?" It's not they said,
"we are moving into oil and gas." Ah, right.

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agumonkey
They keep rebranding it. It feels like Java. Based on that, Watson will be a
success, but not where it was intended to.

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shiven
Yep, soon as Rich Hickey gets around to writing a Lisp for it. Wonder what
he'll call it though. Clotson? Watjure? Wisp?

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teekert
From the article: But he is emphatic that computers will never truly replace
human doctors for the simple reason that the machines lack instinct and
empathy.

“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,” Husain said. “This is where algorithms
fail you.”

I don't understand this sentiment, instinct and empathy are just feelings that
results from small cues that a physician can't exactly put into words. It does
not put them into the realm of magic. And why exactly would a computer not be
able to look at the patient as a whole? Of course a computer can (at some
point) do that. It can even deduce heart rate an breathing rate from a camera
image of a face, something a human can't.

Why do people always assume that if something is difficult to put in words it
is impossible for a computer somehow? It seems like an invalid argument to me.

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gmarx
The hardest thing in medical diagnosis/treatment for a computer to do is not
running algorithms to determine diagnosis/treatment; it's taking the patient
history. If you ask a patient if he has had any abdominal pain, a lot of
patients think about it and decide they have had abdominal pain. It may just
have been some slight discomfort from gas a couple of weeks ago, but doc asked
so it must be important; wouldn't want to leave anything out. Other patients
are stoic and wouldn't really call that raging appendicitis "pain", more like
"discomfort". An experienced doc should be able to read the patient and tell
these apart. Watson? Maybe someday. As with most tasks in medical analytics,
the rate limiting factor is the data.

