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I used to think that until I dated a medical student. It is heartbreaking to me and I'd grasp at any reason or bit of information to be more optimistic but hone

by recuter 13y ago

I used to think that until I dated a medical student. It is heartbreaking to me and I'd grasp at any reason or bit of information to be more optimistic but honestly, get real... How do you think a Venn diagram for medical and computer science (and/or statistics) students looks like? Unlike with jeopardy, you do not have a huge well organized catalog of information lovingly curated by trivia worshiping nerds. It is a ridicules stumbling block but there you have it. Health records are not normalized and you can't touch them anyway, research is closer to human readable prose and filled with jargon - good luck developing NLP for it if you're "just a programmer". Hell, look at their textbooks and the way they study and are trained, that screams for computerized improvement and is still a tall order.

hershel 13y ago
Actually there are already systems in the field that offer better results than people. I remember reading research about decision support systems doing a better job, and there's isabel healthcare , offering decision support system that works great for rare diseases as far as i know. The way they are implemented is by people entering data in an orderly fashion, both those who built the systems ,and doctors . This somewhat limits the system, both from breadth of research and data entry time at the doctor. But even with those limitations , those systems offer far better diagnoses , especially in the rare cases,than you average and even great doctor.
PeterisP 13y ago
You didn't "have a huge well organized catalog of information lovingly curated", however, as the article states, IBM has been working on curating that information for many years already, and they claim that they got all of the knowledge that's taught to med-students already two years ago. So now they can go for the research papers to ensure that the system knows far more than a doctor could read in a lifetime.
crusso 13y ago
You misunderstand how Watson was created. A bunch of trivia worshiping nerds didn't organize and catalog all of its information in the way you're implying. Watson doesn't need perfectly digested raw materials to work with. Watson is able to parse natural language and pull out possibly important information. It then applies some very state-of-the-art machine learning to derive the most likely contextual meaning of that information. That contextual meaning can be cross-referenced with billions of other pieces of weighted information to derive further insights. I come from a family full of doctors. They tend to be smart people, but as Jeopardy showed, even the best player on earth is no match for a machine trained at that discipline. Once we start adding in genetic information, that will allow machines like Watson to customize diagnoses and treatments based upon your specific genetic profile.

by recuter 13y ago

hershel 13y ago

Actually there are already systems in the field that offer better results than people. I remember reading research about decision support systems doing a better job, and there's isabel healthcare , offering decision support system that works great for rare diseases as far as i know. The way they are implemented is by people entering data in an orderly fashion, both those who built the systems ,and doctors . This somewhat limits the system, both from breadth of research and data entry time at the doctor. But even with those limitations , those systems offer far better diagnoses , especially in the rare cases,than you average and even great doctor.

PeterisP 13y ago

You didn't "have a huge well organized catalog of information lovingly curated", however, as the article states, IBM has been working on curating that information for many years already, and they claim that they got all of the knowledge that's taught to med-students already two years ago. So now they can go for the research papers to ensure that the system knows far more than a doctor could read in a lifetime.

crusso 13y ago

You misunderstand how Watson was created. A bunch of trivia worshiping nerds didn't organize and catalog all of its information in the way you're implying. Watson doesn't need perfectly digested raw materials to work with. Watson is able to parse natural language and pull out possibly important information. It then applies some very state-of-the-art machine learning to derive the most likely contextual meaning of that information. That contextual meaning can be cross-referenced with billions of other pieces of weighted information to derive further insights. I come from a family full of doctors. They tend to be smart people, but as Jeopardy showed, even the best player on earth is no match for a machine trained at that discipline. Once we start adding in genetic information, that will allow machines like Watson to customize diagnoses and treatments based upon your specific genetic profile.