IBM's Watson supercomputer has previously demonstrated its versatility by winning the Jeopardy (Own Game) quiz and cooking exotic dishes. However, it seems that he recently displayed the most important of his "talents": saving lives. Doctors from the University of Tokyo published a report that this artificial intelligence diagnosed a 60-year-old woman with a rare form of leukemia, which doctors had misidentified a few months earlier.
It took the analytic engine only 10 minutes to compare the patient's genetic changes with a database of 20 million scientific reports on cancer, to make accurate diagnoses and propose effective treatments that were previously considered unattainable. The university reports that Watson later identified one of the rare forms of leukemia in another patient.
It will likely be a long time before Watson and other artificial intelligence systems become regular consultants to hospitals, and they may not be as useful in the absence of complete and properly prepared comparable information.
However, according to Japanese doctors, these precise diagnoses convincingly demonstrate how useful computer technologies can be in the medical field. One day, doctors simply will no longer have to spend a huge amount of time studying scientific research materials, which may contain a clue to diagnose an obscure disease, or hope for help from colleagues in another hospital. It will be enough to enter the exact data into the computer and the treatment process can begin.