5 ms·

This is like using a sledgehammer to put up pictures. You simply do not need the kind of parallel compute grunt something like watson can provide to do correlat

This is like using a sledgehammer to put up pictures. You simply do not need the kind of parallel compute grunt something like watson can provide to do correlation analysis as they describe. You could cobble this together in {dirty secret scripting language of choice} and run it on your laptop. This is a PR piece - not the article, the activity - to bring forth the idea of computers making decisions about healthcare, based on metrics - not humans, based on metrics and compassion. The cynic in me sees this as setting a disquieting precedent in the direction of healthcare being distributed according not only to patients prospects and treatment needs, but other factors which a financially liable party, say an insurer, would be interested in - such as the earning potential of the patient. I'm pretty sure there was a Star Trek episode about this.

zobzu 12y ago
It's hard to judge and yes it's of course a PR piece. That said there's an interesting part to it. Where it applies, I'd welcome computer based decision or control (for ex. surgical operations where precision is a must) over humans. I'd trust it with my life more than the humans directly, ultimately. We're just not as reliable as the tools we create.
maxander 12y ago
The biology is a bit more complicated than that, though. Sure, if we had a big database of all the correlation factors in some easily computer-readable format, standardized testing procedures that lined up with these factors, and an army of experts keeping all of this up-to-date, it would be easy to write a script to make it all work. But we don't, and (in my off-the-cuff estimation) such a project could wind up being of Human Genome Project-esque scale. Watson is giving us a way of doing this when the available data is in a much less accommodating format (namely, scientific literature.) Not, perhaps, the biggest achievement ever, but pretty nifty and useful.
- dunk010 12y ago
  Actually there are armies of experts keeping this all up to date, and some companies make a lot of money selling this as a service. The name of the role is "curator", and they basically map research to genetic variants, keeping a giant library up-to-date.
gamegoblin 12y ago
I suspect the Star Trek (Voyager) episode you're referring to is: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Critical_Care_%28episode%29 http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Critical_Care_%28episode%29
micro_cam 12y ago
I've worked in the area of clinical genomics using whole genome sequencing. Your statement is unfortunately untrue though it perhaps could be if tools were better written. While it is easy enough to analyze a single genome on your laptop most current popular analytical tools simply fall over when you start looking at hundreds of genomes on even a large server. Even basic stuff like combining multiple genomes into one file with consistent naming of variants can take entirely ridiculous multi terabyte amounts of ram because the tools to do so just weren't written with this scale in mind. Most of these tools could (and should) be rewritten to do things without loading the whole data set in memory and work natively in a cluster of commodity clusters. There is some resistance to this of course because scientists prefer to use the published and established methods and often feel new methods need to be published and peer reviewed etc. Until new tools are written and widely adopted to a large shared memory machine is a bandaid many hospitals and research seam eager to adopt.
- 1971genocide 12y ago
  Multi Terabytes of RAM ? If it was any other field in computer science people would be really critical of your methodology. The size of the human genome is 21 MB. If you are trying to find the co-ordinate of every cancer cell in a human body then sure, You need a lot of RAM. But the output of the collective field of cancer research doesn't seem to be there yet. So why do you need so much RAM ? Usually when your problem becomes NP-hard. You switch to simpler models. Have you checked the search space for all simpler models ? Or are you sticking to complex models since it helps you publish papers ? You also need to understand that hardware only gets you so far, running a cluster has its own costs - network latency. Most often than not, better techniques are required, rather than than say the tremendous improvement in computational power is not good enough.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    > The size of the human genome is 21 MB. No. > In the real world, right off the genome sequencer: ~200 gigabytes > As a variant file, with just the list of mutations: ~125 megabytes > What this means is that we’d all better brace ourselves for a major flood of genomic data. The 1000 genomes project data, for example, is now available in the AWS cloud and consists of >200 terabytes for the 1700 participants. As the cost of whole genome sequencing continues to drop, bigger and bigger sequencing studies are being rolled out. Just think about the storage requirements of this 10K Autism Genome project, or the UK’s 100k Genome project….. or even.. gasp.. this Million Human Genomes project. The computational demands are staggering, and the big question is: Can data analysis keep up, and what will we learn from this flood of A’s, T’s, G’s and C’s….? https://medium.com/precision-medicine/how-big-is-the-human-genome-e90caa3409b0 https://medium.com/precision-medicine/how-big-is-the-human-g...
xamuel 12y ago
>not humans, based on metrics and compassion There's nothing magical about compassion. It's not like if the doctor just wishes you well hard enough, that'll make you get better. Should we stick to hand-crafted silicon chips, painstakingly etched by a former Swiss watchmaker full of compassion? Should compassionate telephone operators route your phonecall to its destination? If you want compassion, ask for a visit from the hospital chaplain.
- LordKano 12y ago
  There's nothing magical about compassion. Unless, of course, you are the one in need of compassion. If it's all about metrics, it's easy to decide that a given treatment comes with an expenditure is too great if only 20% of the patients are saved. That would lead to 100% of the patients who might benefit from the aforementioned treatment being lost. But look at the bright side, you saved a bunch of money.
  - xamuel 12y ago
    That sort of reasoning sounds very good if you're good-looking, charming, live in an affluent area, go to the same church as the doctor, etc. There's a very thin line between compassion and corruption, and neither should have any place in the formal decision-making of medicine. If everyone should be given the treatment, then make a rule saying everyone gets the treatment. Don't leave it up to doctors' compassion.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    If the money is instead going to save 80% of the patients waiting for some other treatment, then good. If it's going to be used for other means, then your problem is not the machine decision, it's the person who allocated the money in that way.
noonespecial 12y ago
Of course its PR. Its hard enough to accept that your doctor is a computer, how much harder if its a javascript from healthcare.gov on a tab opposite cat pictures? The fiction is that, yes its a computer, but its the biggest smartest computer ever! Look it won Jeopardy! We do exactly the same thing with people. The medical system does a great deal of theater to convince everyone that they are getting "the best care possible" even though a moments thought is all it takes to realize that every facility and every doctor can't be even close to equal or "the best". This is one step down the road to getting people to accept automated medical care. It will be lousy at first but it probably is the right path to take if everyone wants to get "the best" care possible everywhere in the future. You can replicate an awesome program for everyone everywhere but not an awesome doctor.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  this one goes in your ass, this one goes in your mouth, this one goes under your arm. no, wait. we'll see if jeopardy staffers frequent these watson hospitals, eating their own dogfood so to speak. > we'll see if jeopardy staffers frequent these watson hospitals, eating their own dogfood so to speak. this should have said: we'll see if ibm watson staffers frequent these watson hospitals, eating their own dogfood so to speak.
  - Crito 12y ago
    What the fuck would a camera man know about any of this, one way or the other? Why would his opinion be interesting at all?
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      ah i see you've spotted my typo. i fixed it now - thank you so much. nonetheless, no need to be so down on camera men, some of my best friends own cameras i'll have you know.
Raphmedia 12y ago
Watson is a new employee. Of course he isn't going to get all the responsibility yet. People don't trust him.
nanl2053 12y ago
It says in the article that each patient's data is 100GB. Definitely a PR piece, but you aren't going to do this work on a laptop.
_delirium 12y ago
It is fairly impressive as a product/sales juggernaut, though. A lot of what Watson is doing is fairly standard expert systems + statistics, in a way very "classic AI" style, like the AI diagnosis systems of the '70s that achieved good results but never managed to surpass the deployment & political hurdles needed to get into hospitals. Besides benefiting from increased acceptance of computers in the hospital in general in the intervening years (iPads are everywhere now, and doctors look things up on the internet more than they'd like to admit), Watson has managed to put together the right combination of PR and politics to get it sold. Lots of managers, in both the medical field and elsewhere, seem willing to try out "deploying Watson" in a way they would never agree to "deploy an expert system".
FeepingCreature 12y ago
Well, the question is- does "compassion" lead to better treatment results on average? Because if not, bring on the robot healthcare.

zobzu 12y ago

It's hard to judge and yes it's of course a PR piece. That said there's an interesting part to it. Where it applies, I'd welcome computer based decision or control (for ex. surgical operations where precision is a must) over humans. I'd trust it with my life more than the humans directly, ultimately. We're just not as reliable as the tools we create.

maxander 12y ago

The biology is a bit more complicated than that, though. Sure, if we had a big database of all the correlation factors in some easily computer-readable format, standardized testing procedures that lined up with these factors, and an army of experts keeping all of this up-to-date, it would be easy to write a script to make it all work. But we don't, and (in my off-the-cuff estimation) such a project could wind up being of Human Genome Project-esque scale. Watson is giving us a way of doing this when the available data is in a much less accommodating format (namely, scientific literature.) Not, perhaps, the biggest achievement ever, but pretty nifty and useful.

dunk010 12y ago
Actually there are armies of experts keeping this all up to date, and some companies make a lot of money selling this as a service. The name of the role is "curator", and they basically map research to genetic variants, keeping a giant library up-to-date.

gamegoblin 12y ago

I suspect the Star Trek (Voyager) episode you're referring to is: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Critical_Care_%28episode%29 http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Critical_Care_%28episode%29

micro_cam 12y ago

I've worked in the area of clinical genomics using whole genome sequencing. Your statement is unfortunately untrue though it perhaps could be if tools were better written. While it is easy enough to analyze a single genome on your laptop most current popular analytical tools simply fall over when you start looking at hundreds of genomes on even a large server. Even basic stuff like combining multiple genomes into one file with consistent naming of variants can take entirely ridiculous multi terabyte amounts of ram because the tools to do so just weren't written with this scale in mind. Most of these tools could (and should) be rewritten to do things without loading the whole data set in memory and work natively in a cluster of commodity clusters. There is some resistance to this of course because scientists prefer to use the published and established methods and often feel new methods need to be published and peer reviewed etc. Until new tools are written and widely adopted to a large shared memory machine is a bandaid many hospitals and research seam eager to adopt.

1971genocide 12y ago
Multi Terabytes of RAM ? If it was any other field in computer science people would be really critical of your methodology. The size of the human genome is 21 MB. If you are trying to find the co-ordinate of every cancer cell in a human body then sure, You need a lot of RAM. But the output of the collective field of cancer research doesn't seem to be there yet. So why do you need so much RAM ? Usually when your problem becomes NP-hard. You switch to simpler models. Have you checked the search space for all simpler models ? Or are you sticking to complex models since it helps you publish papers ? You also need to understand that hardware only gets you so far, running a cluster has its own costs - network latency. Most often than not, better techniques are required, rather than than say the tremendous improvement in computational power is not good enough.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > The size of the human genome is 21 MB. No. > In the real world, right off the genome sequencer: ~200 gigabytes > As a variant file, with just the list of mutations: ~125 megabytes > What this means is that we’d all better brace ourselves for a major flood of genomic data. The 1000 genomes project data, for example, is now available in the AWS cloud and consists of >200 terabytes for the 1700 participants. As the cost of whole genome sequencing continues to drop, bigger and bigger sequencing studies are being rolled out. Just think about the storage requirements of this 10K Autism Genome project, or the UK’s 100k Genome project….. or even.. gasp.. this Million Human Genomes project. The computational demands are staggering, and the big question is: Can data analysis keep up, and what will we learn from this flood of A’s, T’s, G’s and C’s….? https://medium.com/precision-medicine/how-big-is-the-human-genome-e90caa3409b0 https://medium.com/precision-medicine/how-big-is-the-human-g...

xamuel 12y ago

>not humans, based on metrics and compassion There's nothing magical about compassion. It's not like if the doctor just wishes you well hard enough, that'll make you get better. Should we stick to hand-crafted silicon chips, painstakingly etched by a former Swiss watchmaker full of compassion? Should compassionate telephone operators route your phonecall to its destination? If you want compassion, ask for a visit from the hospital chaplain.

LordKano 12y ago
There's nothing magical about compassion. Unless, of course, you are the one in need of compassion. If it's all about metrics, it's easy to decide that a given treatment comes with an expenditure is too great if only 20% of the patients are saved. That would lead to 100% of the patients who might benefit from the aforementioned treatment being lost. But look at the bright side, you saved a bunch of money.
- xamuel 12y ago
  That sort of reasoning sounds very good if you're good-looking, charming, live in an affluent area, go to the same church as the doctor, etc. There's a very thin line between compassion and corruption, and neither should have any place in the formal decision-making of medicine. If everyone should be given the treatment, then make a rule saying everyone gets the treatment. Don't leave it up to doctors' compassion.
- icebraining 12y ago
  If the money is instead going to save 80% of the patients waiting for some other treatment, then good. If it's going to be used for other means, then your problem is not the machine decision, it's the person who allocated the money in that way.

noonespecial 12y ago

Of course its PR. Its hard enough to accept that your doctor is a computer, how much harder if its a javascript from healthcare.gov on a tab opposite cat pictures? The fiction is that, yes its a computer, but its the biggest smartest computer ever! Look it won Jeopardy! We do exactly the same thing with people. The medical system does a great deal of theater to convince everyone that they are getting "the best care possible" even though a moments thought is all it takes to realize that every facility and every doctor can't be even close to equal or "the best". This is one step down the road to getting people to accept automated medical care. It will be lousy at first but it probably is the right path to take if everyone wants to get "the best" care possible everywhere in the future. You can replicate an awesome program for everyone everywhere but not an awesome doctor.

throwawayaway 12y ago
this one goes in your ass, this one goes in your mouth, this one goes under your arm. no, wait. we'll see if jeopardy staffers frequent these watson hospitals, eating their own dogfood so to speak. > we'll see if jeopardy staffers frequent these watson hospitals, eating their own dogfood so to speak. this should have said: we'll see if ibm watson staffers frequent these watson hospitals, eating their own dogfood so to speak.
- Crito 12y ago
  What the fuck would a camera man know about any of this, one way or the other? Why would his opinion be interesting at all?
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    ah i see you've spotted my typo. i fixed it now - thank you so much. nonetheless, no need to be so down on camera men, some of my best friends own cameras i'll have you know.

Raphmedia 12y ago

Watson is a new employee. Of course he isn't going to get all the responsibility yet. People don't trust him.

nanl2053 12y ago

It says in the article that each patient's data is 100GB. Definitely a PR piece, but you aren't going to do this work on a laptop.

_delirium 12y ago

It is fairly impressive as a product/sales juggernaut, though. A lot of what Watson is doing is fairly standard expert systems + statistics, in a way very "classic AI" style, like the AI diagnosis systems of the '70s that achieved good results but never managed to surpass the deployment & political hurdles needed to get into hospitals. Besides benefiting from increased acceptance of computers in the hospital in general in the intervening years (iPads are everywhere now, and doctors look things up on the internet more than they'd like to admit), Watson has managed to put together the right combination of PR and politics to get it sold. Lots of managers, in both the medical field and elsewhere, seem willing to try out "deploying Watson" in a way they would never agree to "deploy an expert system".

FeepingCreature 12y ago

Well, the question is- does "compassion" lead to better treatment results on average? Because if not, bring on the robot healthcare.