Everyone here has got the wrong idea about what Watson is doing here.
It maybe doing sequence analysis, but I've never seen anything about that before.
The real strength is the journal article reading mentioned in passing. What it does is read studies on new treatment options as they are released, and then when a person presents symptoms it will do a diagnosis and suggest treatment options along with supporting evidence.
The natural language understanding needed to do the journal understanding is the real unique offering here.
There are videos on YouTube showing the system. I'm on mobile so I'm not looking them up now.
Everyone here has got the wrong idea about what Watson is doing here.
That would be because the article is very misleading, and without some background in the field, can you blame people for thinking that?
Take for instance this paragraph:
However the process is very time-consuming - a single patient's
genome represents more than 100 gigabytes of data - and this needs
to be combined with other medical records, journal studies and
information about clinical trials.
What would take a clinician weeks to analyse can be completed by
Watson in only a few minutes.
The first section seems to imply that the sequencing data and the analysis data are the same thing, which they aren't.
As for the second section, it is simply not true. Clinicians only intervene at certain points in the process, and their work for a single patient certainly does not take "weeks", however the whole process does. But Watson would not cover the whole process, despite the impression being given.
It is just shoddy reporting, taking shortcuts in the wrong places. What saddens me is that the general public will take the article at face value and expect their caretakers to live up to this fiction.
Have a look at https://youtu.be/UFF9bI6e29U?t=2539 (should link to the 42 minute mark), where they go through slides of the Watson Healthcare UI, and it shows how the Watson reasoning system does diagnosis and suggests treatments.
It maybe doing sequence analysis, but I've never seen anything about that before.
The real strength is the journal article reading mentioned in passing. What it does is read studies on new treatment options as they are released, and then when a person presents symptoms it will do a diagnosis and suggest treatment options along with supporting evidence.
The natural language understanding needed to do the journal understanding is the real unique offering here.
There are videos on YouTube showing the system. I'm on mobile so I'm not looking them up now.