

IBM Adds Medical Images to Watson, Buying Merge Healthcare for $1B - denzil_correa
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/ibm-adds-medical-images-to-watson-buying-merge-healthcare-for-1-billion/?ref=technology&_r=0

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jason_pomerleau
_a radiologist might examine thousands of patient images a day_

Shudder. As a young man, I used to inspect new cars for shipping damage. It
was well known in the business that an inspector's effectiveness dropped off
dramatically as the day progressed. Missed damage could cost our customer
thousands of dollars, and yet even blatantly obvious stuff was missed from
time to time. I once missed frame damage on a pickup truck that had been
chained down a little too enthusiastically. The 45k truck was a write off.

Our inspections numbered in the "hundreds per day". I can't even begin to
imagine the mental haze at the end of _thousands_.

I don't see Watson getting tired.

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orting
Stating it as "thousands of patient images a day" is misleading. It would be
the same as saying you inspected "thousands of parts each day". As the
radiologist further down notes, CT scans contains many slices.

While computers don't get tired, they also have a really hard time solving
stuff like annotation tasks automatically. One thing is getting a good enough
general performance, another is to never make critical errors. I see a huge
potential for ML approaches in health care, but primarily as an aid for the
health care professionals and not as a full replacement.

~~~
andrepd
Maybe not right now, but there is nothing to say that it can't eventually
surpass humans in effectiveness and critical error rate. 10-15 years ago
people would have said "yeah self-driving cars are good, but as an aid for the
driver, never as a full replacement".

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inglor
Just buying other companies is nice - but how about we start with APIs that
don't 500-error every other request?

I <3 all their APIs for Watson but it feels like AWS 3.5 years ago.
Reliability counts.

~~~
pridkett
Is this a general comment or is there a specific service that you're having
problems with? There are IBMers around here (for example, me) that really want
to create a great platform. If it's a specific service that's causing
problems, let me know and we'll figure out what's going on.

~~~
DennisMoore
I'm not who you are replying to, but I am a developer at Merge who is excited
to try out your toolkits! I think there are a ton of opportunities for medical
image analysis in the PACS world. I really hope that IBM will challenge us
with the task of integrating Watson-technology into the PACS workflow. We've
got some really smart employees here and I am hopeful this represents a huge
opportunity for us.

(Secretly I can't help but think the smart business decision is to "black box"
the image analysis as much as possible, but I can't help but being giddy about
it even so!)

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mistermann
Maybe I'm too cynical, but my first thought when reading this was, let's see
how highly paid professionals react when technology is coming for _their_
jobs.

But of course, a few phone calls, the passing of some additional legislation
if needed, and they will be completely protected from any financial
ramifications. At least the world will still be a better place if this
technology actually works.

~~~
naveen99
Radiologist here. Not too worried about watson reading cat scans anytime soon.
image segmentation is not a solved problem. Deep belief networks have been
doing image classification, not segmentation. I welcome more competition in
the radiology Pacs business though; which I think is all this is.

~~~
jpambrun
Ph.D student in medical imaging here.. It is not a question of if but when.
I'm sure factory workers thought they would never be replaced by robots.

~~~
orting
> It is not a question of if but when

You can say that about almost anything, and the world is still full of factory
workers.

As a PhD student in medical imaging, you must also know that getting fully
automating segmentation methods to work to the standard required in the clinic
is really hard. And once you solve it for one clinic you will likely not be
able to transfer the trained model to another clinic, because scan parameters,
patients and workflow are different.

But when we solve the segmentation task, I think most radiologist will clap
their hands and move on.

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__Joker
This is interesting. IBM positioning personal intelligence/expert system as
service. Anybody else working in this space ?

~~~
threeseed
Microsoft Azure has been expanding its analytics capabilities into this space
but more for general Fortune 500 enterprise needs rather than specific
verticals.

I can see the two giants on a collision course in the future.

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AlphaWeaver
I recently had the privilege of meeting one of the engineers on the Watson
project. From what he has shared, I believe that it will be challenging to
replace radiologists with this technology. Sure, Watson can be trained to
identify medical imagery, but that would be the only thing its training model
would be capable of. I believe human radiologists will still be superior.

~~~
gdubs
Huh. I don't have a source handy, but I recall hearing about field trials that
showed Watson used as a diagnostic assistant was able to identify some hard to
identify medical problems, where Watson's human counterparts were unable.

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blueyes
What does it mean to "bring" medical images to Watson? Does Watson actually do
anything, or is it a name for a bunch of services that IBM relies on other
companies to construct?

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RawInfoSec
"I have detailed files on human anatomy." \- T-800

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annoyingdisb
70s called. Expert systems are out of fashion.

Anyway, if you ever used Watson on their Blue-thing you know how horrible the
experience can be. Just pay someone to make some documentation or something
and an API..

~~~
j-pb
Ah yes, let's not do something we can do now, because 40 years ago it sucked
due to technical limitations.

