Quiz Show Champion May Aid Clinical Diagnosis

Supercomputer Watson may be able to apply the same technology it used to beat humans at trivia quizzes in a clinical setting, arriving at a diagnosis faster than a doctor can.

Watson--named after Thomas Watson, the first president of IBM (Armonk, NY, USA)--incorporates a technology called Deep Question and Answer (DeepQA) that allows it to analyze human language and quickly process huge amounts of information to come to an answer. The same technology can also be applied to quickly process hundreds of diagnoses and potentially help treat patients. Watson can sift through an equivalent of about a million books or roughly, 200 million pages of data, analyze the information, and provide an answer in less than three seconds.

Unlike Google, Watson is not a search engine that presents the top most reliable answers. Instead, it homes in on the most important parts of a query and responds with an answer in the way a human brain would. For instance, if Watson is given the query: “This hormone deficiency is associated with Kallmann's syndrome,” it would rapidly locate a passage in medical literature that read, in part, “Isolated deficiency of GnRH or its receptor causes failure of normal pubertal development and amenorrhea in women. This disorder is termed Kallmann syndrome when it is accompanied by anosmia and has also been termed idiopathic hypogonadotropic hypogonadism.”

Rather than latching on to a random noun in that passage, such as amenorrhea or anosmia, Watson knows that GnRH refers to Gonadotropin-releasing hormone, so it selects it as the correct answer. Watson may also have future uses in helping to alert clinicians to adverse drug reactions, forming postoperative discharge and follow-up plans, and in managing chronic conditions. Watson’s capabilities were presented at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, held during March 2012 in Las Vegas (NV, USA).

“The average experienced clinician needs close to two million pieces of information to practice medicine, which they get in part from reading medical journals,” said Nick van Terheyden, MD, chief medical information officer at Nuance Communications (Burlington, MA, USA). “Doctors subscribe to an average of seven journals, which contain more than 2,500 new articles each year. It would require 80 hours of reading per week to keep up with all the newest medical literature.”

IBM and WellPoint (Indianapolis, IN, USA) announced a partnership in 2012 in which Wellpoint will use Watson technology to develop healthcare products to help aid in medical diagnosis.

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