New Scientist published an interesting story last week describing how Watson — the IBM question-answering supercomputer that bested the world’s leading human competitors on Jeopardy! in February 2011 — is blazing new trails in medicine, learning how to help doctors diagnose patients: IT IS more than a year since Watson, IBM’s famous supercomputer, opened a new frontier for artificial intelligence by beating human champions of the quiz show Jeopardy!. Now Watson is learning to use its language skills to help doctors diagnose patients.   Progress is most advanced in cancer care, where IBM is working with several US hospitals to build a virtual physicians’ assistant. “It’s a machine that can read everything and forget nothing,” says Larry Norton, […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Suchi Saria, a 2011 Computing Innovation Fellow who recently joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in computer science as well as health policy and management. Suchi co-led the organization of the second annual symposium on Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data (MUCMD) in Los Angeles, CA, with Randall Wetzel, professor of anesthesiology at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Our growing health care need is one of the largest looming crises of our time. In the United States, per capita spending in health care constitutes the highest in the world and almost twice that of the country ranked second. However, our […]