Some technical details on Watson

ibm.com

44 points·nl··5 comments

I'm not sold on the efficacy of clinical decision support systems (like Watson) in healthcare.

Here is a recent study comparing quality of care using EHR/CDSS and without: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/archintern...

"Our findings indicate no consistent association between EHRs and CDS and better quality. These results raise concerns about the ability of health information technology to fundamentally alter outpatient care quality."

Nice to hear about all the open source projects that went into this. I'd hope that the work that IBM did on those projects was contributed back to them and not just squirled away on some mainframe.

UIMA (http://uima.apache.org/) was donated to Apache by IBM in the first place, and they continue to contribute.

I doubt any core changes would have been need to Lucene for this application.

Wow, incredible article. I don't think many people truly understand the potential this has for Healthcare.

The application to healthcare is essentially a product of the problem that Watson solves. i.e. an abstraction of a set covering problem, which along with applications in pattern recognition(which is roughly the field that Watson is solving ) the same problem occurs in species identification, medical diagnostics, fault diagnostics and logistical efficiency.

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