Health Journalism 2012
Future of artificial intelligence in patient care
• Michael A. Covington, Ph.D., associate director, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Georgia
• Martin Kohn, M.D., chief medical scientist, IBM
• Fred Trotter, patient hacktivist, Cautious Patient Foundation
• Moderator: Antonio Regalado, business editor, Technology Review
By Sara Altshul
Banish any notions of artificial intelligence fueled by sci-fi films. One day soon, doctors will use artificial intelligence to diagnose and treat disease.
That was the crux of the “Future of Artificial Intelligence in Patient Care” panel at Health Journalism 2012.
Making this interface between humans and computers possible is “natural language processing (NLP),” which allows computers to understand express themselves in human language, said Michael A. Covington, Ph.D., associate director for the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Georgia.
You might remember Watson, and the shellacking it gave Ken Jennings, the longest-winning Jeopardy champ in history. One of the most famous examples of NLP applied to artificial intelligence, Watson and its developers are teaming up with medical specialists to teach it what it needs to know to help support medical diagnosis and treatment. In fact, there’s currently a collaboration afoot between IBM and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where “MSKCC clinicians will begin ‘teaching’ the computer to review oncological case histories and come up with the right diagnoses and treatments,” according to a March 22 article by Bruce Upbin at Forbes.com.
Watson as Jeopardy contestant was really a showcase for this new iteration of artificial intelligence, said Martin Kohn, M.D., chief medical scientist for IBM. Unlike computers we use every day, as a natural language processor Watson understands and expresses itself in human language. Its starring turn on Jeopardy was designed to demonstrate its human-like ability to process complex clues and discern appropriate answers.
“The interesting question is whether Watson is going to be as good as a regular physician, said Fred Trotter, a hactivist who works for social change by coding and promoting open source health software.
Sara Altshul is an editor and writer for Diane Magazine. She was a 2012 AHCJ-New York Health Journalism Fellow.
