Axel Nemetz, Director of Strategies of the Health Division of IBM Watson, anticipates innovators the new diseases that this artificial intelligence tool is beginning to treat.
When IBM managed to defeat with its Watson machine to humans in the Jeopardy television contest! Few could imagine the enormous implications that this cognitive computing solution was going to have in the future of technology.100,000 million dollars in investment later, Watson is already being used in sectors as diverse as health, financial services, legislation, retail trade and education;throughout 36 countries around the world.
The first of them, health, is perhaps one of those that best reflects the relevance of this innovation, while the object on which analysis and predictions have to do is none other than the human being itself.
Therefore, in April 2015, the North American company created a specific division to explore new uses of Watson in the health environment, and has since invested more than 5,000 million in purchases and alliances with third parties to strengthen its system, which already alreadyNot only is it able to understand and manage the natural and technical language of millions of documents and written files, but now you can also analyze medical images and make assessments about them.
This is explained by Axel Nemetz, Director of Strategies of the Health Division of IBM Watson, with whom innovators speaks during a meeting held at the Foundation Ramón Areces.«Cognitive systems are key to future health.That a tool like this can not only predict diseases and recommend treatments in individual people, but also to make abstractions on a concrete regional population will be something that will change the way of understanding medicine and health management in the future ».
At the moment, IBM Watson is already being set as a essential medical consultation tool in the field of oncology, where there is a large amount of documentation, scientific literature and patient data on which their artificial intelligence can work.
In this way, specialist doctors can receive personalized recommendations for each patient based on all the knowledge available in the world on the subject, practically in real time, with the latest advances in the field and with the possibility of comparing the chances of success of success ofEach treatment with other similar patients.
Of course, Axel Nemetz clarifies that they are always trying to "a second opinion, we will never replace the doctor, because he is responsible for the patient and who knows all the factors involved in the treatment."
But Watson is not going to stop in treating cancer, but IBM is already exploring other diseases where a clear application can have in the near future: «At the moment we are focused on optimizing the cancer recommender, but we do have some projectsConcrete with some clients in other ailments, such as mental illnesses -where we predict serious peaks of these diseases -, diabetes (both to analyze possible people of risk and to avoid diabetic crises) or respiratory problems », anticipates Nemetz."They are always chronic diseases or with long periods of recovery, at least for the moment."
The data problem
However, for Watson to work, it needs a basic thing: information.And while accessing scientific publications or medical studies is not a problem, it is to achieve real files of patients to work on.«First you have to build the house from the foundations: if we do not have the aggregate and interrelated data, if each hospital functions as a silo, it is more complicated to analyze them.You can always develop Watson for a single hospital, but the idea is to compare the more information the better, ”concludes an optimistic and hopeful Nemetz.
Source: The world
