Physicians at Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai Medical Center will use IBM's Watson supercomputer system to help diagnose medical conditions and select treatments, the Los Angeles Times reports (Lopez, Los Angeles Times, 12/17).
Background
In September, health insurance company WellPoint announced an agreement to use Watson to create a commercial application aimed at benefiting the insurer's 34.2 million members.
The application will combine data from:
- WellPoint's existing history of medicines and treatments;
- Watson's expansive library of textbooks and medical journals; and
- Patients' charts or electronic health records.
The computer system will sift through all the data and answer a question within moments, providing possible diagnoses or treatments ranked in order by the computer's confidence (iHealthBeat, 9/12).
Cedars-Sinai Project
Physicians at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai will be the first medical providers to use the technology, according to IBM. The company said the physicians will recommend fixes to the system.
WellPoint is funding the project.
William Audeh, head of the Oschin institute, said, "I don't see Watson taking the place of a doctor, but I do see it acting as a super library for a doctor" (Los Angeles Times, 12/17).