Hospitals test IBM ‘diagnosis tool’

Two US hospitals are to trial an intuitive IBM computer program that outwitted human opponents on hit US game show Jeopardy! last week.

The agreements with Columbia University Medical Centre and the University of Maryland School of Medicine will be the Watson programme’s first real-world tests outside of the trivia game show and IBM’s laboratories.

Watson represents a breakthrough in the ability of computers to understand human language and scour massive databases to supply the most likely answer to questions.

It is not 100 per cent correct, but it holds promise for doctors and hedge fund managers and other industries that need to sift through large amounts of data to answer questions.

Eliot Siegel, a professor at Maryland University’s medical school, said other artificial intelligence programs for hospitals have been slower and more limited in their responses than Watson promises to be.

They have also been largely limited by a physician’s knowledge of a particular symptom or disease.

“In a busy medical practice, if you want help from the computer, you really don’t have time to manually input all that information,” he said.

Prof. Siegel said Watson could prove valuable one day in helping diagnose patients by scouring journals and other medical literature that physicians often do not have time to keep up with.

Yet the skills Watson showed in easily winning the three-day televised Jeopardy! tournament also suggest shortcomings that have long perplexed artificial intelligence researchers and which IBM’s researchers will have to fix before the software can be used on patients.

“What you want is a system that understands you’re not playing a quiz game in medicine and there’s not one answer you’re looking for,” Prof. Siegel said.

“In playing Jeopardy!, there is one correct answer. The challenge we have in medicine is we have multiple diagnoses and the information is sometimes true and sometimes not true and sometimes conflicting.

“The Watson team is going to need to make the transition to an environment in which it comes up with multiple hypotheses – it will be a really interesting challenge for the team to be able to do that.”