Updates on Dr. Watson
Dr. Watson, I presume?
It looks like Watson-esque computers could begin to be used in nations like India (with a rapidly-growing population and a dearth of doctors and healthcare providers to serve it) within 1-2 years. Seems like the perfect place to start: both in affluent areas of the country where people happily take on new technologies (at times even quicker than in the West), or in poorer areas where medical assistance is desperately needed.
I particularly like this explanation, by Dr. Manish Gupta, of IBM:
“A doctor is essentially doing something analogous to what a person does on a quiz show: questions that are asked on the quiz show are parallel to a patient coming in and describing his problem. There may be medical test reports, descriptions of the problem and the current state. In confusing or ambiguous situations, doctors rely on literature they had read in school or current medical developments and their own experience before coming out with one or more hypotheses (of what the disease could be).”
Similar to the way physicians have adopted lab testing equipment, smart phone apps, and Up to Date, for example; these "Watson, MDs" will soon be utilized as tools of the healthcare trade.
And at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, steps are being taken to this end for the US market as well. Speech recognition programs are being integrated with the question-answering and data-mining capabilities of Watson to develop an "examining room" or "bedside" version. Early adopters may be able to start to utilize the tool in 2013.
