

Some technical details on Watson - nl
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/industry/library/ind-watson/

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bhousel
I'm not sold on the efficacy of clinical decision support systems (like
Watson) in healthcare.

Here is a recent study comparing quality of care using EHR/CDSS and without:
[http://archinte.ama-
assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/archintern...](http://archinte.ama-
assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/archinternmed.2010.527v1)

"Our findings indicate no consistent association between EHRs and CDS and
better quality. These results raise concerns about the ability of health
information technology to fundamentally alter outpatient care quality."

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CountHackulus
Nice to hear about all the open source projects that went into this. I'd hope
that the work that IBM did on those projects was contributed back to them and
not just squirled away on some mainframe.

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nl
UIMA (<http://uima.apache.org/>) was donated to Apache by IBM in the first
place, and they continue to contribute.

I doubt any core changes would have been need to Lucene for this application.

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mikecuesta
Wow, incredible article. I don't think many people truly understand the
potential this has for Healthcare.

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dmboyd
The application to healthcare is essentially a product of the problem that
Watson solves. i.e. an abstraction of a set covering problem, which along with
applications in pattern recognition(which is roughly the field that Watson is
solving ) the same problem occurs in species identification, medical
diagnostics, fault diagnostics and logistical efficiency.

