IBM’s Watson, the same supercomputer that does everything from beating Jeopardy champions to cooking up unique new food recipes to helping devise cures for cancer, now has a new trick its working on - the ability to see, so to speak.
Right now, Watson helps doctors and medical researchers by allowing them to ask any question and have Watson answer, in plain English or any other language. That answer, formed thanks to Watson’s ability to very quickly access all the data, all the articles, anything that was ever published on a particular medical subject. Now though, Watson can also see things like X-rays, MRIs, CAT scans - all to help doctors form a diagnosis or treatment.
“There are many, many images in the course of providing care to someone that could be generated, extracting the minute details of these images,” says Shahram Ebadollahi of IBM Watson Health Group. “For example, the shape of a tumor, the size of it, the edges of that tumor becomes very informative for the course of action the doctor needs to prescribe to the patient."
In addition, one of the big intentions here is to help doctors spend their time more efficiently and help them spend their time with you more efficiently.
Dr. Daniel Sodickson is the vice chair of research in radiology at the NYU School of Medicine. He has no affiliation with IBM but says having a system like Watson as a wingman could potentially be groundbreaking in helping to ensure fewer mistakes or missed diagnoses.
“There are certainly things we can miss and in particular the volume of data that a radiologist is called upon to look at day by day is huge and expanding, and so one immediate thing that I can see that would be very helpful is for a computer with appropriate training to flag suspicious areas in this ocean of data," he says.
IBM says this ability for Watson to see should be ready for doctors within about the next year or so.