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A classic use of watson that IBM is saying is in the field of medical science - Imagine if we can feed the entire set of medical books into watson (somebody estimated that would just take about a week for watson to process and make the connections) and then you have the watson physician's assistant which can listen into the symptoms and spit out the first five most probably causes - that would be so damn amazing!

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There are already experimental clinical decision support applications which, given a list of symptoms, can produce the differential diagnosis. But they generally aren't very useful since in most cases the physician can figure out the same diagnosis just as quickly. Real medicine isn't like House, MD.

IBM is more likely to apply Watson technology toward analytics and data mining. There are huge amounts of clinical data locked up in unstructured text reports. If they can analyze that data in a useful way to draw correlations between symptoms, patient demographics, medications, treatments, and outcomes then that could add a lot of value for medical researchers.

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