Why IBM Watson Will Be the Next Greatest Diagnostician

The team over at IBM Watson is building quite the incredible AI. Over the past few years we have seen the projects built on top of Watson become increasingly complex; for instance, the machine learning program has been used to build many of the common recommendation engines being used today to provide users with content before they even know they want it. But as engineers gain more experience with the software, they are finding that the power of the software may be far greater than anyone first imagined. When people first learn about machine learning software, it is intuitive that common, repetitive tasks will be outsourced with the software like planning travel or completing repeating tasks. However, now machine learning researchers are teaming up with healthcare researchers to build better tools for diagnosing and treating diseases like cancer.

The team at Healthcare Analytics News explored some exciting finds from recent Watson projects involving the treatment of cancer patients. Using it's advanced machine learning algorithms, Watson has been able to successfully identify therapies for 323 cancer patients that went overlooked by a molecular tumor board. This is incredible; IBM Watson has saved the lives of these 323 patients. Read more about this exciting project being built on top of IBM Watson here. This proof of concept is exciting not only because we may be able to help cancer patients, but because this shows the power machine learning software has to change the way we practice medicine. The insights we can gain from machine learning software like this can be used to battle any disease, not just cancer. With the power of advanced machine learning, perhaps one day we may be able to evolve our treatments faster than diseases can evolve to withstand them. Even if we never get quite that far, we're already seeing how IBM Watson and similar projects can lead to less human error and more saved lives in medicine.