Now that the dust has settled on the Jeopardy showdown, IBM and Nuance Communications have announced a research agreement to develop the Watson supercomputer for the healthcare industry. The deal combines Big Blue’s deep question answering (QA), natural language processing, and machine learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and clinical language understanding (CLU) solutions to diagnose and even treat patients.
Dr. John E. Kelly III, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, is confident that the collaboration sets the stage to “transform the way healthcare professionals accomplish everyday tasks.”
Meet Dr. Watson
IBM offered a scenario in which a doctor who is considering a patient diagnosis could use Watson’s analytics technology and Nuance’s voice and clinical language understanding solutions to consider all the related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature. Armed with this information, Watson could help medical professionals determine the most likely diagnosis and treatment options.
Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine are also pitching into Dr. Watson’s intelligence. Dr. Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, said Watson has the potential to help doctors reduce the time needed to evaluate and determine the correct diagnosis for a patient. “We also believe that Watson has the ability to help doctors provide personalized treatment options that are tailored to an individual patient’s needs,” he said.
Exploiting Watson’s Full Potential
IBM thinks a Dr. Watson could save lives and that seems very likely, said David Hill, principal analyst at the Mesabi Group. In any event, he said, IBM seems most comfortable dealing with applications that are an extension of its enterprise-business focus. While that’s fine, IBM may not exploit Watson’s full potential.
“For example, it does not seem like Watson will appear on the Internet…