From Jeopardy to oncology: 60 Minutes feature on IBM Watson

Popular US news show highlights emerging role of cognitive systems

Since winning Jeopardy in 2011, IBM Watson has made significant strides in multiple fields, including oncology. Cognitive systems are particularly well-adapted to this field as they can help experts process more data than the experts could ever do on their own.

How much data? As Norman Sharpless, Director, University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center explains, there are 8,000 new research papers on oncology posted every day. It’s not feasible for even a team of experts to read through all of this, however Watson is well-adapted to assimilate all that information and provide insights.

Charlie Rose from the popular 60 Minutes news magazine recently explored the topic in a feature episode.

So in an area like oncology where there is so much new data available, does this actually translate into positive patient outcomes? Yes, as Sharpless points out,

“The probably more exciting part about it is in 30 percent of patients Watson found something new. And so that’s 300-plus people where Watson identified a treatment that a well-meaning, hard-working group of physicians hadn’t found.”

But the power of a cognitive system goes beyond just looking at text-based data. John Kelly from IBM Research describes how they were able to teach Watson to read scans and detect tumors by giving it tens of thousands of images of what normal looks like to help it spot the abnormal.

In terms of where IBM development is focused in this emerging space, Rose says “IBM’s philosophy is to use Watson for specific tasks and keep the machine dependent on man.” This equates more to ‘augmented intelligence’ rather than ‘artificial intelligence’.

Norman Sharpless of UNC goes into more detail on the project in this article on the THINK blog.

Read the full transcript of the 60 Minutes story on CBS.