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Watson's medical expertise offered commercially
- lutusp 14y agoI 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.html#Evaluation http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/lp22/CS237/CS237MedicalXSys.h... 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 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."