Watson and Cancer

The supercomputer known as Watson is in the news again.

(Yes, now that I'm dug out of the snow, I can get back to thinking about cancer.)

Watson had actually been mentioned as a cancer fighter soon after he won on his Jeopardy appearance.  (He may have won, but he didn't do it with the kind of style that this kid did it with. You just can't program that kind of thing into a computer.)

The plan is to give Watson lots and lots of information:  1.5 million patient records and outcomes; 600,000 pieces of medical evidence; 2 million pages of text from medical journals and clinical trial records; and the nearly 800 entries from this blog. (I don't know if that last part is true, but they're welcome to them if the want them.)

Watson will then use all of this information to help diagnose lung cancer and make recommendations for treatment.

It makes sense. Even the best Tumor Board couldn't put all of its collective brain power to work at once, recalling everything they've known about cancer, to make a recommendation on a patient the way a computer could. There will be less arguing, if nothing else. (Dr. C told me long ago that, if you had 12 oncologists look at a patient, they'd come up with 13 different opinions.)

Of course, a computer can't necessarily take into account the kind of emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs of a patient, at least not from the data they say they will be feeding it. For a Follicular Lymphoma patient, especially, that seems pretty vital.