Aren’t you tired of ubiquitous and time consuming tests, wrong diagnoses, or nurses googling your symptoms? Many people are. Although you would be wrong to think that this state of affairs will last. In not so distant future your health will be evaluated by an accurate data processing AI, which has a chance of becoming your favorite, most compassionate and understanding doctor.
Meet IBM’s Watson. A life saver.
Digital technologies have infiltrated our lives. They tell us what and where to buy, which books we might like and sometimes even which man to date. Most people feel uneasy when they start exploring the issue deeper. Good lord, at this rate relatively soon the algorithms will tell us how to vote. And we will listen. Moreover, we won’t question their expertise.
It is not all doom and gloom though. Some algorithms are here to save our lives.
IBM have designed a universal data processing algorithm, which has so far proven itself vitally useful in medicine. Notably, for patients diagnosed with diseases which require unprecedented amounts of tests and prescriptions in order to get treated. One can’t just rely on Excel or traditional data storage units anymore. We need an AI. And not just any AI, we need a learning, self-developing AI. Here are some notable facts about Watson:
- It proved itself to be a revolutionary data evaluator and diagnosis giver in oncology. Indeed, when a possibly lethal disease is concerned, there is no time to waste on additional tests and trial and error treatments. In August 2016 for example, Japanese doctors reported Watson diagnosing a rare form of leukemia in 10 minutes. Doctors had tried numerous treatments of the other forms of the disease and kept erring until Watson stepped in.
- All thanks to its ability of analyzing thousands of documents faster than anything in the world, Watson is capable of listing treatments according to their efficiency and safety. That is, after consulting your physician remember to address to Watson afterwards. Just in case.
- More and more hospitals around the world aim at obtaining IBM’s creation. Today around 50 hospitals around the world can afford such luxury.
- So far Watson has taught itself to diagnose breast, lung, colon, rectal, gastric, ovarian, cervical and prostate cancers.
- HUS women hospital has also acquired Watson. It is learning to prevent bacterial inflammation.
The reader might wonder, how can this piece of code be also compassionate? A real doctor can’t be replaced by Watson no matter how accurate it is.
Okay. Let us define “compassion”. Imagine a woman diagnosed with cervical cancer. She doesn’t have kids yet and probably won’t. She is devastated, she thinks she is less of a woman now, she is at a loss. The doctor’s task is not just to give her the next chemo appointment and wish a safe drive home. In such cases doctors become the patients’ psychologists, they ought to say something that can ease the patient’s suffering. Thus, compassion in medicine is mostly defined by the right words, the right linguistic combination, that will trigger a chemical process in the brain, which will help one calm down. Truth be told, people are not the best at it. We can’t always come up with such combination.
But I am convinced that Watson will. NLP (Natural Language Processing), which constitutes the core of Watson’s capability of text analysis is being continuously developed. Thanks to that miracle of cognitive and computational linguistics computers are learning to process written speech, analyzing subtle semantic differences. The fact that Watson is not capable (yet) of recognizing human emotions through speech is just a mere technical problem, that undoubtedly has a solution. Perhaps, a psychiatrist won’t be a luxury in the future.
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