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posted by martyb on Monday September 11 2017, @01:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the looks-like-they-blue-it dept.

It was an audacious undertaking, even for one of the most storied American companies: With a single machine, IBM would tackle humanity's most vexing diseases and revolutionize medicine.

Breathlessly promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world's imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer.

But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn't living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM's goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.

[...] Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company's claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, "even new approaches" to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn't create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.

Watson "has failed to end a streak of 21 consecutive quarters of declining revenue at IBM." Ouch.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @03:06PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @03:06PM (#566232)

    Sorry, but I don't fully agree with you.

    Like I said, symptoms are often similar, but the underlying processes are not. You could throw all the cancers under one name and definition "Cancer" (like you state), but Watson got confused by it and got nowhere.

    Take for example leukaemia, which is considered a group of cancer of white blood cells. Some of these cancers are very quick and lethal, while others are slow and can be properly treated (even if needed). The cells can even show different phenotypes, suggesting different processes are at work that cause the cells to become cancerous.
    If "cancer is one disease" then that would also suggest one common/shared cause that could be treated with one medicine. If that would be the case the common cause would already be known (which is not, as quite a share of genes/loci have been pointed to as involved in various cancers) and the various different treatments (with different success rates) for various cancers show that you need to keep them separate.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @05:54PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @05:54PM (#566292)

    If you can detect aneuploidy in vivo and kill cells with the wrong number/shape of chromosomes you will be able to cure 90%+ of all cancer.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:28PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @06:28PM (#566306)

      If you could detect cells with foreign DNA/RNA, then you could cure 100% of bacterial and viral infections; therefore, all infectious disease is the same and we shouldn't bother calling them different diseases.

      The distinctions among cancer types are useful for diagnosis, survival expectations, treatment development, and treatment strategy.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @07:19PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @07:19PM (#566335)

        Your idea is impossible in principle since no two cells will have exactly the same sequence. Not the same for number of chromosomes.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @07:50PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @07:50PM (#566346)

          That's funny because there is a lot of precedent for what I mentioned: basically all forms of microbial, plant and, obviously, mammalian immune defense systems. While your idea is a "simple answer to everything".

          Since you are failing to connect the dots with that example, how about this:
          If we had a mechanism to detect autoreactive immune cells and kill them, then we could cure all autoimmune disease; therefore, all autoimmune diseases are the same.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @08:47PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @08:47PM (#566375)

            I connected the dots just fine, the HLA system, etc doesn't do what you said. In the last case, sure. Different manifestations of the same disease, cured with a common treatment would now be one disease. That is what happens in the case of successful science, things get simpler to understand.