> “It’s been a struggle to update, I’ll be honest,” said Dr. Mark Kris, Memorial Sloan Kettering’s lead Watson trainer. He noted that treatment guidelines for every metastatic lung cancer patient worldwide recently changed in the course of one week after a research presentation at a cancer conference. “Changing the system of cognitive computing doesn’t turn around on a dime like that,” he said. “You have to put in the literature, you have to put in cases.”

Wow the way they describe Watson is just like a massive book of documentation, with some NLP functionality layered on top to interface with the doctors. Keeping the database up to date must be a huge undertaking. Also this:

> "Given the same clinical scenario, doctors can — and often do — disagree about the best course of action, whether to recommend surgery or chemotherapy, or another treatment. Those discrepancies are especially wide for second- and third-line treatments given after an initial therapy fails, where evidence of benefits is slimmer and consensus more elusive."

Having an expert doctors opinion hard coded into the machine sounds good, but it won't be as good as a doctor in the room who can pick up on all sorts of other cues that I'm not sure how'd you even type into a computer. Things like breathing patterns, reaction to tactile stimuli, fuzzy logic ('that hurts, that hurts more'), facial expressions and so on.

Seems like this project has a long way to go, to get to the standard the IBM marketing team are pretending it's already at.