App Log: IBM Watson, BIg Data and Treatment for Cancer

It is heartening to see emerging technologies like Big Data Analytics, Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence combined into powerful tools to solve real problems. IBM Watson is an example. From Wikipedia

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM‘s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci.

From Watson provides cancer treatment options to doctors in seconds

Watson has ingested more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, two million pages of text from 42 medical journals and clinical trials in the area of oncology research.   Watson has the power to sift through 1.5 million patient records representing decades of cancer treatment history, such as medical records and patient outcomes, and provide to physicians evidence based treatment options all in a matter of seconds.

Starting with 1,500 lung cancer cases, Memorial Sloan-Kettering clinicians and analysts are training Watson to extract and interpret physician notes, lab results and clinical research, while sharing its profound expertise and experiences in treating hundreds of thousands of patients with cancer.

The core of the technology is available through Apache Foundation’s UIMA Project.

UIMA – a framework for  analyzing  large volumes of unstructured information and discover relevant knowledge  to a user

You can look at sites and services that take advantage of UIMA’s capabilities.

Meta:

Applog is a series of curated links of innovation applications of emerging technologies.