What technology means for healthcare
Machine won against man last week. And here’s the headline you didn’t see but should have: “Machine squeaks by man on terribly tilted playing field.”
On balance, 14 years after IBM’s Deep Blue trounced chess master Gary Kasparov, humans still outperform computers on multiple levels. Especially where it counts most, if for a moment you step into the shoes of a Colorado trauma surgeon.
Nonetheless, the latest headline-grabbing machine is Watson, another IBM supercomputer that bested the best of the best of TV’s “Jeopardy!” competitors.
News stories reported that Watson “crushed” trivia geeks Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, whose cranial matter have earned them nearly $7 million in combined “Jeopardy!” earnings.
But if you read below the headlines, it was a lot closer match-up. In fact, you learn pretty quickly that the contest was nowhere near a fair fight.
Watson the colossus
In an era of teeny-tiny processors and one-atom-thick computer circuitry, Watson is a comparative colossus, roughly the size of ten refrigerators. It cost between $100 million and $2 million to build, depending on which news story you choose to believe.
A team of 25 IBM whizzes spent nearly four years cramming 200 million pages of text into the Frigidaire-on-steroids-sized mass. The information blitzkriegincluded encyclopedias, thesauri, novels, plays, and past “Jeopardy!” clues and answers.
Poor Jennings and Rutter, the mere mortals. In a sports analogy, pitting the IBM juggernaut against their neuro wiring is akin to the Denver Broncos’ starting offense lining up against Carmelo Anthony and Carlos Gonzales.
The latter two are stupendously accomplished and compensated athletes. But CarGo and CarFinallyGone are also outweighed by the former 11 collectively by eight to one, and on a gridiron the challenge would be over before you could say “Knickerbocker.”
Yet Watson’s stacked odds are far from a bad thing. After the “Jeopardy!” taping, the next-day story was what the computer victory might mean to health care.
Shortly afterward, IBM announced a deal with a tech company and two medical schools to explore how Watson might better untangle the mysteries of disease diagnosis and treatments.
Making Watson into Dr. Watson
Here’s one example of the potential good computers can bring to medicine: Research shows that radiologists misdiagnose cancer and other serious illnesses as much as 30 percent of the time.
Improving this rate could no doubt save thousands of lives annually. Computer reads of CT and MRI scans might be just the ticket for corrective second opinions and backstops to physician errors – avoiding unnecessary surgery in some cases and guiding patients to the right kind of treatments in others.
We’ve all been here before. With time, Watson’s ten-refrigerator dimensions will probably shrink to some pocket-sized gadget for doctors to haul around and vastly improve health care.
But the bigger question is, can a machine ever learn gut instinct? For this, we turn to James Harwood, M.D., a Littleton trauma surgeon for nearly 30 years.
Before the Watson story broke, Dr. Harwood related to me personally the most valuable lessons of long medical experience – namely, that a skilled physician can often tell as much about a patient from the most nuanced body language as from data.
Throughout his career, in passing the hospital bed of a post-operative patient, he would notice the subtlest but most telling of signs: the facial expression on a sleeping patient’s face, the body position in bed, and even the way the patient grasped bed clothes.
From such clues, he could detect and address complications and problems that otherwise would have escaped notice.
Bed checks & gut checks
“You don’t learn this stuff in medical school,” he said. “And machines and tests don’t tell you everything. You learn it only through an awful lot of visceral feedback.”
In other words, gut instinct. On this point Dr. Harwood has an ally in “Jeopardy!” superstar Jennings, who noted, “To make informed decisions about anything in life, you need to have knowledge. If you need a Google search, you’re still at a disadvantage.”
We can only hope that a future Watson of some kind lessens the physician’s burden of responsibility. But will a machine ever be capable of spotting nuanced hints?
I’m a technology professional, but I’d put my money on the perpetual need for human thinking. In the face of life-affecting decisions, no silicon circuitry can ever fully emulate the poetry of abstract judgment.
In a true partnership with computers, humans will certainly waltz ever more gracefully into a future of improved health and wellbeing. But if we expect the computers to dance alone, we should anticipate nothing but gangly robotic gyrations.
About Vanguard Communications
Since 1994, Vanguard Communications has provided specialty healthcare marketing with a strategy focused on patient education guaranteed to bring new patients to specialist physicians, physician assistants, nurses and therapists in private, university and hospital practices. Through its MedMarketLink program, Vanguard combines the disciplines of online and offline PR, strategic marketing and information technology for healthcare providers coast to coast.