Watson, the IBM supercomputer and recent Jeopardy! champion, is being groomed as a bedside medical tool to help doctors diagnose illnesses quickly and accurately.

After its commanding win on Jeopardy! in February over phenom quiz challengers Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, IBM’s artificial intelligence computer system Watson was faced with a new challenge: what next? At the Innovate2011 conference, IBM hinted at plans to reprogram the software and market it for several varied purposes, such as business analytics or legal work, according to InformationWeek.

IBM, which turned 100 years old last week, recently revealed just how Watson would function as an important diagnostic and research tool in the medical industry.

Before its appearance on Jeopardy!, Watson was loaded with digital versions of reference documents, including encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and millions of pages of the Internet, including the entire text of Wikipedia. When confronted with a quiz question, Watson used multiple algorithms to establish the important key terms in the question, then determine statistically related phrases.

If Watson was asked a question with key phrases like “Mark Twain,” “Mississippi River” and “Jim,” it would be able to determine that all of those phrases are statistically related to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more so than, for instance, “football.” But it would also be able to run the answer it finds statistically most probable against the interrogative parts of the question to determine if the answer was feasible.

How could this ability be used for real world functions? IBM is focusing on health care. The company has teamed up with University of Maryland School of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center and software developer Nuance Communications to develop a version of Watson as a clinical tool to help physicians diagnose and treat patients.

Because Watson is efficient at answering questions and determining not only a statistically most probable answer, but a litany of possible answers, the applications as a diagnostic tool are obvious. Medical professionals are often presented with patients exhibiting a set of symptoms that are common to various afflictions. The medical incarnation of Watson is able to evaluate the symptoms presented and offer a list of possibilities, each ranked with a percentage of accuracy.

Dr. Herbert Chase, Columbia University medical professor and adviser to the Watson program, sees numerous benefits for doctors using the Watson program. “If a person has a 95 percent chance of having disease X, there’s still a one-in-20 chance that they have something else,” he told AP. “We often forget what’s in that 5 percent. But Watson won’t.”

In order to properly diagnose patients, Watson was loaded with millions more documents, including medical journals and textbooks. Future input may include patient inquiries on blogs and medical websites like WebMD, Chase says.

According to the Associated Press:

At a recent demonstration for the Associated Press, Watson was gradually given information about a fictional patient with an eye problem. As more clues were unveiled — blurred vision, family history of arthritis, Connecticut residence — Watson’s suggested diagnoses evolved from uveitis to Behçet’s disease to Lyme disease. It gave the final diagnosis a 73 percent confidence rating.

Using Watson in a health care setting under a physician’s supervision helps reduce the deficits of both computers and human minds. “We want to keep Watson doing what computer systems are good at, which is going through a large amount of information — more than anything a person can hold in their head,” explains Dr. David Gondek, Watson team leader, in Scientific American. “And the doctor is part of the process that the human being is good at: deep understanding, experience, and intuition.”

However, the device is not designed to tell doctors what to do, and it is highly unlikely there will ever be a “Dr. Watson.” As Carl Kesselman, director of the Health Informatics Center at the University of Southern California, told AP, “Will a physician ever blindly accept a diagnosis coming out of a computer? I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.”

Earlier: How IBM’s Watson Won Jeopardy!

References

‘Jeopardy!’-Winning Computer Delving into Medicine
by Jim Fitzgerald
The Associated Press, May 21, 2011

It’s Your Virtual Assistant, Doc. Who is Watson?
by Karthika Muthukumaraswamy
Scientific American, June 9, 2011

What’s Next for IBM Watson? Big Data
by Frank Ohlhorst
InformationWeek, June 10, 2011