Cleveland Clinic Taps IBM's Watson For Med School

Partnership builds Watson's aptitude for clinical decision support

The Supercomputer known as Watson will help medical students at Cleveland Clinic to analyze medical problems and develop evidence-based solutions.

The IBM natural language processor, meanwhile, will be building its base of medical knowledge and improving its Deep Question Answering Technology, making it a more valuable partner to future physicians, according to an announcement from IBM. Another goal will be using Watson to process an electronic medical record "based on a deep semantic understanding of the content within an EMR," the computer-maker says.

You might remember Watson as the computer that beat two Jeopardy! champions last year, sorting through its reams of knowledge to respond to oral questions from host Alex Trebek. Watson wasn't perfect: It responded "Toronto" to a Final Jeopardy! question about U.S. cities with airports named after World War II heroes.