IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

And in trying to apply Watson to cancer treatment, one of medicine’s biggest challenges, IBM encountered a fundamental mismatch between the way machines learn and the way doctors work. And the products that have emerged from IBM’s Watson Health division are nothing like the brilliant AI doctor that was once envisioned: They’re more like AI assistants that can perform certain routine tasks. “Doctors go to work every day—especially the people on the front lines, the primary care doctors—with the understanding that they cannot possibly know everything they need to know in order to practice the best, most efficient, most effective medicine possible,” says Herbert Chase, a professor of medicine and biomedical informatics at Columbia University who collaborated with IBM in its first health care efforts.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org