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IBM’s Watson Could Revolutionize Healthcare

If you’ve been watching Jeopardy! over the past couple days, you probably know that IBM’s highly-advanced artificial intelligence software, Watson, has been competing against Jeopardy!’s most successful contestants (and as of Tuesday night, took a commanding lead over the humans, despite having some trouble with United States geography).

Besides the amazing ability to power through “Daily Doubles” and answer random trivia in the form of a question, IBM researchers believe that Watson could revolutionize the healthcare industry. From diagnostics to informatics, Watson could quickly search through medical records, clinical documents, and research information for precise answers that would benefit both doctors and patients.

Check out the video below to see physicians explain how Watson’s technology could transform medicine.

Also watch the TED.com webcast of Dr. David Ferrucci (Principal Investigator of the DeepQA/Watson project at IBM), Dr. Herbert Chase (Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University School of Physicians and Surgeons), and others discussing the Jeopardy! challenge and the impact the technology behind Watson could have on society.

More information on Watson from IBM…

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

Canadian Medicine Interviews Dr. Val

Sam Solomon over at Canadian Medicine, did a great job of introducing our recent interview. Please check it out.

Educated in Nova Scotia before she moved to the United States to do degrees in biblical studies and medicine, Dr Val Jones is now one of the most popular physician bloggers. Her work has appeared in MedPage Today, Revolution Health, a now-defunct blog called Dr. Val and The Voice of Reason and, most recently, her own internet company Better Health.

Last year, Dr Jones was accredited as a member of the National Press Club in Washington, DC, and has focused much of her recent reporting on health policy reform efforts. She still practises medicine part-time as a rehab specialist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Dr Jones is also a talented cartoonist and her cartoons‘ take on medicine displays a sharp, wry sense of humour.

This week, Dr Val agreed to answer some questions for Canadian Medicine:

Canadian Medicine: Did you know as an undergrad at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that you wanted to be a physician?

Click here for the rest of the post.

Latest Interviews

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

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Latest Cartoon

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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