Dr. Watson Is Non A Meaningful User

IBM’s Dr. Watson of Jeopardy! fame has survive completed its residency together with fellowships and, presumably to its creators’ utter delight, is instantly a practicing Oncologist. The prodigy “cognitive system” completed its grooming inwards less than a twelvemonth at the illustrious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, together with although solely proficient inwards lung cancer correct now, Dr. Watson’s career equally an advisor to oncologists everywhere is off to a corking start. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 late released video demonstration shows Dr. Watson inwards action, researching, evaluating together with treating a 37 twelvemonth onetime adult woman with newly diagnosed phase IV lung cancer inwards his advisory capacity to a hurried together with pretty uninspiring human oncologist. Regardless of the slightly weird scenario, it is worth noting that inwards a fraction of a 2nd Dr. Watson, scours 3,469 text books, 69 guidelines, 247,460 magazine articles 106,054 other clinical documents together with 61,540 clinical trials, together with evaluates their contents against the patient’s EMR to position demand for farther diagnostic tests together with handling options for this patient. Being an exceedingly helpful advisor, Dr. Watson speedily reads the entire EMR together with uses his trained processing mightiness to eliminate all the clutter inwards the EMR, presenting to the human physician solely information pertinent to this item diagnosis. Ouch.

On the other side of town, ONC is busy apologizing for the sorry state of what it calls “interoperability”, blaming everything from the lack of standards to people’s inability to handgrip on a restricted ready of vocabularies for the medical profession. According to the ONC philosophy of interoperability, solely “computable” information tin strength out live exchanged or analyzed inwards a meaningful way. In other words, all medical professionals must larn to limited themselves inwards a standardized way which computers tin strength out understand.  To that halt nosotros direct maintain ICD-9, ICD-10, SNOMED-CT, LOINC, RxNorm together with all sorts of other terminologies together with vocabularies aimed at restricting the English linguistic communication language to the limited computational abilities of available EMR software. How create you lot tell “Mr. Smith is a pleasant 82 twelvemonth onetime gentleman with a miserable demeanor” inwards SNOMED? You don’t. You dispense with the pleasantries (pun intended) together with diagnose Mr. Smith with depression. The Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis is past times no agency a settled subject, simply if it contains whatever truth together with vocabulary does touching on cognition, hence how volition restricting clinical vocabulary touching on the cognitive abilities of its users over time? We don’t know, together with frankly I am non interested inwards finding out.

The folks at IBM took a dissimilar route. Paraphrasing Sir Francis Bacon, loosely quoted as, “If the mount won't come upwards to Muhammad hence Muhammad must become to the mountain”, Dr. Watson’s creators must direct maintain decided at approximately bespeak that if the physician won’t come upwards to the figurer hence the figurer must become to the doctor. Instead of framing the occupation past times bespeak how nosotros tin strength out alter human communications to improve enable the electrical flow generation of computers to “understand” humans, IBM began past times figuring out how to alter computers to improve enable them to sympathise electrical flow forms of human communications. Thus, Dr. Watson learned to read books together with articles together with all sorts of “unstructured” information, because no affair how difficult the powers to live are trying to tally the foursquare peg of human linguistic communication into the circular hole of figurer language, together with tragically vice versa, close information generated past times people is inwards their natural linguistic communication together with Dr. Watson was programmed to procedure natural language. So if Dr. Watson is able to “read” one-half a 1000000 pieces of text of diverse heft inwards a 2nd or so, how long would it direct maintain for it to read an onetime fashioned newspaper chart, or an electronic rendition thereof? I am pretty for sure that if you lot inquire nicely, Dr. Watson would live happy to rearrange it for you lot inwards whatever way you lot choose, acre pointing out the close pertinent parts to your electrical flow objective, highlighting discrepancies, missing together with redundant information, all inwards a picosecond or less. And interestingly plenty IBM developers idea it wise to direct maintain a generalized path to Watson’s education, instead of creating specialized Watsons each with linguistic abilities specific to a domain. Seems to a greater extent than human friendly that way…

The Turing test or non yet, Dr. Watson is non a existent doctor, together with it volition non live i inwards our lifetime. Dr. Watson has no complimentary volition together with everything it knows is dictated past times the corpus of knowledge made available to it past times its creators or employers. There volition live huge ethical together with legal questions raised past times software capable of supplanting human conclusion making processes, together with software that tin strength out live centrally deployed together with manipulated to this end. Even earlier that futurity arrives, it is worth noting that Dr. Watson is simultaneously employed inwards oncology clinics together with past times payers, together with inwards my opinion, Dr. Watson has i push also many – the straight push to the insurance company, which volition automatically approve payment for Dr. Watson’s altitude recommendations, simply presumably non hence much for other choices. Like all technologies, Watson embodies promise for the greater practiced along with corking novel perils for ordinary people. Leaving these philosophical questions aside for a moment, the solely for sure thing is that Dr. Watson is starting its vivid novel career past times introducing a cure for i real painful affliction that is reaching pandemic proportions with medical professionals: clicking boxes.