Watson Could be the Answer to Fighting Mesothelioma
by Nancy Meredith
Anyone that watched the last three nights of “Jeopardy!” should be left in awe at the brain power exhibited by previous million-dollar champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Although, in the end, they could not compete with the brilliance and speed of their opponent, Watson — a supercomputer made up of 90 servers that can sort through terabytes of data and ring in with a correct answer in a fraction of a second. Now it’s time to put Watson to work in the real-world solving problems in the fields of finance and medicine. For Watson, finding a cure for deadly diseases, such as mesothelioma, could be elementary.
Who or What is Watson?
Watson is the result of 4 years of hard work in IBM’s latest Grand Challenge – “Can a system be designed that applies advanced data management and analytics to natural language in order to uncover a single, reliable insight in a fraction of a second?” Using “Jeopardy!” as the ultimate test required IBM to build a machine that can interpret natural or human language that relies on the ability to relate pictures, phrases, figures, slang and nuances.
The programmers needed to develop analytics that would “push science in ways that weren’t thought possible before” to get to the heart of human intelligence. According to IBM’s “White Paper: Watson – A System Designed for Answers,” the system has a combined total of 16 Terabytes of memory and can operate at over 80 Teraflops (trillions of operations per second). Basically, this means that Watson has the capability to perform thousands of simultaneous tasks in seconds to provide precise answers to questions.
Watson and the Medical Field
This technology is called question answering (QA) technology, and IBM took on this Grand Challenge with a goal to provide a tool that would prove invaluable to businesses and industries. The ability to use Watson technology to quickly find value in the volumes of complex data companies are faced with every day will be transformational.
In the field of medicine, doctors are required to make a diagnosis based on a set of test results and symptoms as exhibited by the patient. However, the diagnosis can be limited to the physician’s knowledge and past experience. Mesothelioma, an asbestos-related pulmonary cancer, is one disease that is often misdiagnosed due to the relative rarity of the disease, and the lack of knowledge among many physicians.
With Watson used as a diagnostic aid, however, the volumes of data and medical cases that could be accessed by the computer can provide the physician with a sound diagnosis, or with the appropriate information needed to treat the patient successfully. Within seconds, doctors around the world can find the best treatments and ensure the best outcomes for their patients. Mesothelioma is an aggressive cancer, and early detection and treatment is critical for improved survival.
Can Watson Find a Cure for Mesothelioma?
The amount of medical data related to mesothelioma, and all cancers, is almost unfathomable. Research, clinical trials, case studies and medical journals are only a portion of the data that can be sifted through to find the critical piece of information that could result in a breakthrough leading to a cure to mesothelioma.
According to IBM, Watson was designed to get intelligence out of unstructured data and to present the data to end-users in a manner in which they can find real value in it. Watson can read, understand and retain information on millions of documents. As one IBMer put it, Watson “represents a way to look at the data and extract a needle in the haystack.” The needle could be the missing piece to finding a cure for mesothelioma.
Dr. David Ferrucci, Watson Principal Investigator, took on the project of Watson making a deliberate choice to use a design that would “ensure more rapid adoption of optimized systems in industries such as healthcare and financial services.”
When Watson is made available to the medical field, it will revolutionize medicine and will offer hope to many patients.
