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IBM Says Watson Health's AI Is Getting Really Good at Diagnosing Cancer

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: June 1st, 2017, 8:00pm UTC

An anonymous reader shares a report: In deciding on cancer treatment, doctors often get together in a "tumor board" to go over the options. IBM's Watson now sits in on those meetings in a few hospitals, such as in South Korea and India -- and it generally makes the same calls that a human expert would. So says IBM in a series of studies it's presenting this weekend at the ASCO cancer treatment conference in Chicago. "It's not making a diagnosis. That's not what we set out to do," says Andrew Norden of IBM's Watson Health division. "They will run Watson Oncology in a tumor board and sort of get another external opinion." Watson's "concordance rate" -- the degree to which it agrees with human doctors -- ranged from 73% to 96%, depending on the type of cancer (such as colon cancer) and the particular hospital where the study was done (in India, South Korea, and Thailand).pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=IBM+Says+Watson+Health's+AI+Is+Getting+Really+Good+at+Diagnosing+Cancer%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2rZyd8S"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F17%2F06%2F01%2F2023208%2Fibm-says-watson-healths-ai-is-getting-really-good-at-diagnosing-cancer%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/06/01/2023208/ibm-says-watson-healths-ai-is-getting-really-good-at-diagnosing-cancer?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/06/01/2023208/ibm-says-watson-healths-ai-is-getting-really-good-at-diagnosing-cancer?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/Iob-s-NphRE" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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