IBM’s Watson: Becoming a Doctor with Data Analytics

The supercomputer that beat human Jeopardy champions earlier this year is now as advanced as “a second year medical student,” according to Forbes.com tech blogger, Bruce Upbin (@bupbin).

In his post on the matter, Upbin points out that Watson has been training to be a health care diagnostician. While he may not be a candidate for Fox’s Dr. House’s elite fellowship yet (the producers should definitely invite Watson to be on the show), Watson is on the road to changing healthcare diagnosis in the next five to 10 years.

Cramming for Boards

The DeepQA software developers at IBM have been working for the past year to refine how Watson collects and analyzes health data. For instance, the human team (as is required in data analytics) headed by Dr. Eliot Siegal, a senior radiologist and vice chair of informatics at the University of Maryland, provided IBM with a list of the most important texts and journals for Watson to read. Much like a college student (but at a much accelerated pace), Watson hit the books (dozens of them) plus he absorbed the knowledge of the Medline and PubMed databases.