Venyu Blog

So I was channel-surfing the other night and found NOVA – that venerable science show slotted into PBS’ NPR-friendly lineup. Lo and behold it was spotlighting IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer/ hyper search engine that easily dispatched two of the game show Jeopardy’s all-time champions—Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter—last February in an eagerly-awaited contest pitting man against machine.

Provocatively titled “The Smartest Machine on Earth,” the hour-long segment presents Watson’s genesis, the technologists that brought it to life and the run-up to the actual show. Surprisingly, like any of his human counterparts Watson had to “try out” to become a contestant on the show and it took two tries for Watson —based on the inconsistency of its initial performance – to convince the show’s intelligentsia that it (he?) deserved a place at the Jeopardy table. Fortunately for Watson, when a contestant fails to answer what he believes is a lay-up, it can’t hear host Alex Trebek’s tone of voice at full snark, but I suppose that’s one of the benefits in being a machine.

It happened in the very same week that NOVA broadcast its Watson segment (timing is everything folks, either in life or on cable), that CNN Money (and other outlets) published a news item that, in partnership with IBM, Watson had landed its first job with WellPoint, a large health insurance plan provider with more than 34 million subscribers to the health care sector.

According to CNN the goal is for Watson to help medical professionals diagnose and sort out treatment options for complicated health issues.

“Imagine having the ability to take in all the information around a patient’s medical care — symptoms, findings, patient interviews and diagnostic studies,” Dr. Sam Nussbaum, WellPoint’s chief medical officer, said in a prepared statement.

“Then, imagine using Watson analytic capabilities to consider all of the prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowledge in the medical literature and clinical best practices to help a physician advance a diagnosis and guide a course of treatment,” he added.

Watson can sift through 200 million pages of data and provide a response in less than three seconds. But perhaps even more impressive than Watson’s speed is its ability to process natural language, the way that humans speak it.

Watson is able to do this quickly thanks to software that runs on 10 refrigerator-sized racks of IBM Power7 systems. The machine is a grandkid to Deep Blue, the chess-playing IBM supercomputer that trounced world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

In a separate eWeek article, Dr. Anthony Nguyen, WellPoint’s senior vice president of care management, told eWEEK. “”The goal of this WellPoint/Watson effort is to improve people’s lives,” It gives us an opportunity now to give physicians and practicing doctors the most updated information while they’re treating our members and our patients.”

The IBM technology will be able to pull information from social networking accounts to see what patients’ preferences are, Nguyen noted.

For “Jeopardy,” Watson ran on 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers powered by eight-core CPUs, but for the trials with WellDoc, the insurer will determine the hardware components it requires, according to Rod Smith, vice president of emerging technology at IBM.

“Watson runs on hardware that will be tailored to what WellPoint needs as far as hardware,” Smith told eWEEK.

In its new role Watson will sort through large amounts of electronic health records (EHRs) and unstructured medical data to help doctors and nurses provide recommendations on treatment plans, Smith said.

“It will bring scientific information specially tailored to you and also layered with your desires and wants that will hopefully increase your [medication] compliance,” said Nguyen.

WellDoc will roll out the trials in two stages. By the end of this year, nurses at WellPoint will begin to test the technology to help them make decisions on whether a patient might need treatments such as bariatric surgery. In the first quarter of 2012, WellPoint will test the technology on oncology cases like prostate cancer, said Nguyen.

If the development of products goes well in initial trials, WellPoint will expand applications to include use by other specialists such as cardiologists and pediatricians, Nguyen added.

Initially, WellPoint clinicians will apply Watson technology through a PC-based Web browser, but researchers may eventually use tablets and other mobile devices as well, said Smith.

Although Watson was a speaking robot on “Jeopardy,” IBM and WellPoint will decide through the course of the trial how Watson will present answers to doctors and nurses, Smith said.

“The user experience is going to be very important, but how it fits into WellPoint’s operations will be critical,” said Smith. “We’ll explore many ways to bring answers.” In the meantime, Smith suggested thinking of Watson as a “dashboard.”

From where I sit there’s a part of me that appreciates Watson not just for the depth of its knowledge and its ability to sift patterns in language using what IBM has speculatively (and ominously) coined “machine learning,” but also because I can’t help thinking of Watson’s eventual successors becoming the equivalent of a multi-tenancy cloud. Used only when needed (e.g. on demand) and archiving data selectively for multiple clients.

WellPoint plans to begin deploying Watson technology in small clinical pilot tests in early 2012.

Oh, and as for Watson being the progenitor of SkyNet (as depicted in the Terminator franchise), I demur to Jeopardy Champion Ken Jennings who, in final jeopardy, flipped his card to reveal not only his “question,” (this is Jeopardy, after all), but also his perspective on Watson. Quote: “I for one welcome our new Computer Overlords.”