
Watson's medical expertise offered commercially - Lightning
http://news.yahoo.com/watsons-medical-expertise-offered-commercially-173205800.html
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lutusp
I hope everyone realizes this is the beginning of the end of the practice of
allowing doctors to offer their own diagnoses. Doctors already cannot offer
treatments they invented themselves (the evidence-based revolution in medical
practice now only allows treatments vetted by clinical research), but
computer-based "expert systems" appear to be able to offer more reliable
diagnoses, given a clearly expressed set of symptoms. And Watson wasn't the
first expert system to show this ability -- an expert system named MYCIN
(early 1970s) performed better than clinicians with whom its results were
compared:

[http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/lp22/CS237/CS237MedicalXSys.h...](http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/lp22/CS237/CS237MedicalXSys.html#Evaluation)

It is important to add that, notwithstanding MYCIN's demonstrated abilities,
it was never used in actual clinical practice:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin>

A quote: "MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated
that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better
than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the
same criteria."

