Watson gets IBM in health care (Digital Trends)

It didn't take long for demonstration of IBM the question answering system stunt Watson Jeopardy winning find some lenders: IBM announced an agreement with Nuance Communications to apply the technology Deep Question Answering of Watson in the healthcare field. The partnership of research will also address one of the main deficiencies that Watson demonstrated in Jeopardy, Watson analytical skills combined with voice recognition technology so that the system can understand what people say, rather than having to questions put to it as plain text.

"By combining our experience of Google analytics with the experience and technology from Nuance, we can transform the way healthcare professionals daily tasks, allowing them to work smarter, more efficiently," said IBM senior VP and Research Director Dr. John e. Kelly III, in a statement. "This initiative demonstrates how we intend to apply the features of Watson in new areas, such as health care with Nuance."

Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of medicine will work on the project. Nuance and IBM hope to have direct products based on technology poised to enter the market at 18-24 months. The project will also benefit from clinical language understanding Nuance solutions to improve the understanding of Watson medical vocabulary and terminology.

Interests of the healthcare industry Watson comes apparent capacity to process information quickly available in natural language — rather than deliberately coded for computing — and make quick connections, high level between key elements of information from disparate sources. The technology could be applied to help health professionals keep up with the vast amount of clinical and scientific research is published in the healthcare field every day; looking ahead, Watson technology could be applied to some of the questions that have been long expected for so-called "strong AI" systems such as drug interactions, and diagnosis in real time.

[Image: IBM]