A new study, in which IBM Watson took just 10 minutes to analyze a brain-cancer patient's genome and suggest a treatment plan, demonstrates the potential of artificially intelligent medicine to improve patient care. But although human experts took 160 hours to make a comparable plan, the study's results weren't a total victory of machine over humans.
The patient in question was a 76-year-old man who went to his doctor complaining of a headache and difficulty walking. A brain scan revealed a nasty glioblastoma tumor, which surgeons quickly operated on; the man then got three weeks of radiation therapy and started on a long course of chemotherapy. Despite the best care, he was dead within a year. While both Watson and the doctors analyzed the patient's genome to suggest a treatment plan, by the time tissue samples from his surgery had been sequenced the patient had declined too far.
IBM has been outfitting Watson, its "cognitive computing" platform, to tackle multiple challenges in health care, including an effort to speed up drug discovery and several ways to help doctors with patient care. In this study, a collaboration with the New York Genome Center (NYGC), researchers employed a beta version of IBM Watson for Genomics.
IBM Watson's key feature is its natural-language-processing abilities. This means Watson for Genomics can go through the 23 million journal articles currently in the medical literature, government listings of clinical trials, and other existing data sources without requiring someone to reformat the information and make it digestible. Other Watson initiatives have also given the system access to patients' electronic health records, but those records weren't included in this study.
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http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/diagnostics/ibm-watson-makes-treatment-plan-for-brain-cancer-patient-in-10-minutes-doctors-take-160-hours
