IBM's Watson goes to work in Hospital

This work has nothing to do with Watson.<p><a href="http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/streams/" rel="nofollow">http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/streams/</a><p>The research name is System S.

Watson is used here the same way people use Hoover and Kleenex. I thought the article would be about IBM beginning to refit their question/answering inference system for aiding in diagnosis at hospitals. But it is not.<p>The article is about researchers monitoring large streams of data and using machine learning to help in detecting whether an infant in the ICU has an infection. The data streaming tech is from IBM though and based on what was used in Watson, so there is that link.<p>Interesting work nonetheless and hopefully an echo of things to come. Perhaps those working in the analysis and prediction on massive streams of data part of HFT could reapply their skills here in a way that could literally save lives.

Steve Yegge wrote about this years ago, under the assumption that it's what Google was working towards at the time. This is back when he was working for Amazon. Ctrl-f this piece for "save your brother's life": <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/google-at-delphi" rel="nofollow">http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/google-at-delphi</a><p>What we'll end up with is increasingly powerful expert systems, and the human strategists behind the scenes will operate at a higher and higher level.

We get it. The title is wrong. I am rather disappointed by the low quality of the discussion here about a rather interesting article.

Good to see that Watson is making the transition to a useful expert system/aid-to-humans quickly; and interesting to see that David Ferrucci's and Chris Welty's comments about adapting Watson from Jeopardy use to medical use came to fruition only 2 months after they made them during a showing at RPI of the Jeopardy episodes in which Watson competed.

"Software that is vaguely similar to some of the techniques used in Watson used in Hospital" would be a more accurate headline.

I think only InfoSphere is common to both applications.

Interesting application of the technology.<p>Infections and acute illnesses in infants in general are scary for a number of reasons. These guys can go bad very quickly. They can't tell you if and where they hurt, so it's a little like veterinary medicine.<p>In training, very subtle clues like a slightly elevated heart rate or (in particular) respiratory rate didn't initially alarm me because in adults these kinds of isolated findings mean practically nothing. Very experienced peds nurses would occasionally take a look at a baby I'd just examined and wasn't worried about...and <i>would</i> worry. I learned quickly to trust what seemed like intuition. We'd start the wheels in motion for more vigorous intervention.<p>These nurses (and the docs who then benefit from their experience) were applying a lot of (sometimes unwritten, if not unconscious) heuristics in these evaluations. A system doing this rigorously, objectively, and routinely is a good application of such software.