IBM Adds Medical Images to Watson, Buying Merge Healthcare for $1B
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Shudder. As a young man, I used to inspect new cars for shipping damage. It was well known in the business that an inspector's effectiveness dropped off dramatically as the day progressed. Missed damage could cost our customer thousands of dollars, and yet even blatantly obvious stuff was missed from time to time. I once missed frame damage on a pickup truck that had been chained down a little too enthusiastically. The 45k truck was a write off.
Our inspections numbered in the "hundreds per day". I can't even begin to imagine the mental haze at the end of thousands.
I don't see Watson getting tired.
Voice recognition software autocomplete is about as good as your phone's autocorrect...
While computers don't get tired, they also have a really hard time solving stuff like annotation tasks automatically. One thing is getting a good enough general performance, another is to never make critical errors. I see a huge potential for ML approaches in health care, but primarily as an aid for the health care professionals and not as a full replacement.
I <3 all their APIs for Watson but it feels like AWS 3.5 years ago. Reliability counts.
(Secretly I can't help but think the smart business decision is to "black box" the image analysis as much as possible, but I can't help but being giddy about it even so!)
But of course, a few phone calls, the passing of some additional legislation if needed, and they will be completely protected from any financial ramifications. At least the world will still be a better place if this technology actually works.
So, from time to time you'll hear, typically in ethnic communities in western countries, of non-certified people practicing dentistry off the books. I have no way of knowing what skill level they tend to operate at, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't somewhat equivalent to where mainstream dentistry was at say 20 years ago - so certainly not the best, but far better than nothing. But when it leaks out this is happening, they are shut down immediately.
As a comparison, auto mechanics is also quite complicated, but if you literally can't afford to have it dealer serviced, at least you have less-better but affordable alternatives. Not so with dentistry, because they have a powerful industry lobby that sees that any competition is formally illegal, and any freelancers have the full force of the law brought down to stop their practice. The argument for this I imagine would be "public safety", yet auto mechanics also has a public safety aspect, a much larger one I would argue, yet I can buy tools and work on my own car in my garage without breaking any laws.
And so it will go as technology progresses, industries and professions with government connections will often be untouchable.
The older I get, the more I see a similar pattern recurring everywhere (but in different forms), such as the "Why is rent so high and pay so low" article on the front page of HN today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024681
Fortunately these lobbies are only national. You can always go to Vietnam / India / Whatever and get your non-emergency medical and dental care done there. I got my wisdom teeth out for $30 in Saigon; the only difference (besides $300 in price) was the tools were a little older and I was in an open-floor cubicle instead of a closed office.
I'm fortunate enough (so far) to still have one of those high paying jobs, but I worry a lot about not just myself but for society in general. To me a very likely natural progression is that as the power of technology increases, it will be the well connected monied class who either harness it to make themselves even more wealthy, or at the very least use the courts to protect themselves from harm. So in that sense, while it is unfortunate to read about your brother, at the same time it is encouraging in a strange way that the one profession that you'd think would use the legal system is also being hurt by technology and outsourcing. But it is also discouraging in that it shows once again that those in power (and already have more money than they know how to spend) are willing to even throw "their own" over the side of the ship in the pursuit of even more money to add to their pile.
The world is becoming increasingly bizarre every day from a financial perspective. Yesterday I was reading a community bulletin board and see a handwritten "for sale" ad for some household items (plates, scarves, various knick knacks) for like $2 to $10 per item - the whole lot might be $50. That'll buy you like two days of survival, then what? Of course it's good to recycle, and I'm not saying the seller needs this money, but when you can probably go to the dollar store and buy all of those items brand new for the same or lower price, it's kinda like what's the point. Last night I figured I'll sell my old cell phone that I paid $700 for a few years back, spent over an hour wiping it, etc and then check craigslist for going rates, I'll be lucky if I can get $75 for it.
All these things kind of invoke a feeling of cognitive dissonance in me, know what I mean? To me the world just seems in many ways to be in almost a logically impossible state of equilibrium at the moment. From everyone freaking out about "peak oil" 5 years ago, suddenly we have massive oversupply of oil and commodities, and it seems plausible that it may remain that way for a very long time, if not indefinitely - which again, could be good or bad depending on your lot in life.
How does it all end?
You can say that about almost anything, and the world is still full of factory workers.
As a PhD student in medical imaging, you must also know that getting fully automating segmentation methods to work to the standard required in the clinic is really hard. And once you solve it for one clinic you will likely not be able to transfer the trained model to another clinic, because scan parameters, patients and workflow are different.
But when we solve the segmentation task, I think most radiologist will clap their hands and move on.
Go is a much harder problem in large part because it's really hard to accurately classify which board is better off.
Teaching Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Go: "Our convolutional neural networks can consistently defeat the well known Go program GNU Go... It is also able to win some games against state of the art Go playing program Fuego while using a fraction of the play time." http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3409
anyways, that's not my point. i'm saying deep learning for image analysis has been a huge success, and people should explore ways to apply this success to medical imaging.
but just for your info, neural networks are slowly being generalized to a lot of other challenges. look around for topics on recurrent neural networks, memory networks, reinforcement learning, etc etc. i don't think we've fully finished exploring the many ways neural networks can help solve life's challenges just yet.
I can see the two giants on a collision course in the future.
Anyway, if you ever used Watson on their Blue-thing you know how horrible the experience can be. Just pay someone to make some documentation or something and an API..