Why health care can get a boost from big data and cognitive computing

Modern medicine does wonders when it comes to targeted healing of our specific ailments - especially when it comes to mechanical malfunction of a body part. Surgeons can go to very precise organs and fix or even replace them with bionic parts.

While the health care system trains doctor to test, scan and treat targeted ailments, every now and then, we come across anecdotes of physicians not being able to think holistically to produce the correct diagnosis. Today's diagnosis is often done by individual symptoms or test results - not by connecting the dots of myriad other discrete symptoms or past health history of the patient. In other words, even the best medical technology is still ways off from treating the human body as a super-complex system.

A friend of mine has been seeing doctors for years with many individual but apparently unrelated issues - backache, fatigue, recurring eye redness and on and on. Every time she received "adequate" treatments for the specific conditions but they all kept coming back. Not until she, at the behest of another friend with similar history, researched and consulted multiple experts could she find her real underlying degenerative chronic auto-immune condition.

So what have big data and artificial intelligence got to do with this? Could be a lot.

In an engineering conference for the automotive industry (where I work), Rob High, CTO of IBM Watson Solutions, made a case for 'big data' and cognitive computing in solving complex problems including medical diagnostics. Integrating myriad medical data and past history in to a cohesive medical diagnosis can be a computing challenge. Even if we ignore the lack of holistic approach, modern health care in many ways is becoming victim of its own rapid progress. According to Dr. High, new medical information and discoveries now double every two years. Nearly, 80000 pages of new medical information are created daily. Yet, a typical medical practitioner hardly keeps in touch with a meager fraction of these new discoveries. An average doctor, processes no more than 5% of this growing knowledge base and is often miserably outdated. 81% of physicians don't even spare five hours per month to keep up.

In 2011, IBM demonstrated its own progress in artificial intelligence, data analytics and cognitive computing when its Watson computer program bested Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter - the all time best Jeopardy! champions in a three-day competition. What Watson demonstrated was its capability to understand the clues and contexts hidden in an 'answer' and then to analyze all relevant information and prior learning from its very large memory and produce the most statistically relevant outcome. Clearly the same technology has potential to lend a hand to develop more integrated medical diagnoses.

I am encouraged that Cleveland Clinic is looking to apply this technology for its expert "diagnosticassistant'. I also hope that someday, smart evidence-based (if not fully holistic) treatment as indicated by this Youtube demo about oncology treatment may become routine.

Happy New Year!

Another year bids us goodbye as we zoom in to 2013. 

While the world continues to stay mired in war, politics, religious fanaticism - the world of technology and science continues to push its frontier ensuring that progress will indeed be made. If 2011 was the year that made  smartphones, tablets and social media a global phenomenon, the biggest stories in 2012 were really about the basic sciences. 

In fact, the most memorable scientific milestones of 2012 happened in space, far away from our home, in Mars, where NASA's 2-ton rover Curiosity flawlessly landed on Mars and became our explorer extraordinaire in the red planet. Videos available in YouTube show how technologically challenging and awesome a feat it was. I wish the popular media spent as much time on it as the dog-fight between Apple and Samsung.

 I will also remember 2012 as the year of yet another feat that combined science with man's indomitable spirit of adventure, when FelixBaumgartner jumped off the edge of the space, from 127,000 feet of altitude breaking both sound barrier and few  world records and providing vital information for NASA's space research. In some sense, this was the mother of all reality-TVs, where precise calculations, space science, preparation, and sheer human grit all came together.

And on October 10, a privately built robotic cargo capsule aboard the unmanned Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station to make the first-ever commercial cargo delivery to the orbiting lab 250 miles high up in the space. Even if it is only a small transition from public to commercial enterprise, the event symbolically takes space exploration to a new frontier.

To me,  iPad Mini, Windows phone, launch of Lytro camera were all good news, but I am glad that fundamental scientific progress continues to happen to build foundation for even greater future technology.

We can't wrap up 2013 without the recent visibility of the science of probability and uncertainty - as personified by NateSilver during the last US presidential election.  Silver’s prediction model — based on a weighting of the public polls available in each swing state — continued to suggest that the incumbent was a strong favorite. Silver achieved a rock star status and in the process made 2012 a memorable year for statisticians, data geeks, number-crunchers, and  political junkies. 

Looking forward to more progress and technology wonders in 2013 !

Social Media and Social Etiquette

This is the decade of social media. 

I was doing my usual scan of technology news.  Sure enough, there was yet another new media app. Samsung is releasing ChatOn2.0 as warm-up to CES 2013. It's like a mother of all chat apps - you can chat with up to five connected devices on a single account, you can do group chats, invite friends to conversations from different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Weibo, mix multi-media in your chat and on and on. 

It seems niche social networking apps are popping up almost weekly, connecting us in our virtual world in myriad ways - keeping track of our friends, sharing our media, arranging a game, check-in to your place of interest, finding a date and on and on. In other words, short of hugging your friend, you can pretty much connect to your friends in all possible ways without leaving your leaving room sofa.  

The beauty of these tools is that you can connect without really being connected. Your Facebook settings are configured to send birthday wishes to your friends while you are asleep. Before the clock strikes midnight on Dec 31, your pictures from Times Square will find its way to your friends so you can celebrate the New Year together - no need to be really together!

Don't get me wrong.  I am a personal fan of social networking and continue to be excited about things I could not have done without these tools. It is nice to be able to stay linked to people across the globe who may share the same hobbies or went to same school and be able to share ideas, location, media at the push of a button.

 I can't help wondering if the ease of our digital networking and sharing will someday take over our human connections or sometimes make us forget our basic human traits.

I was appalled and shocked last week to read about the most brutal andhorrific rape of a woman in India. I was appalled even more when I saw a picture of the woman from her hospital bed posted all over Facebook. Many of these people were well-intentioned and wanted to share their outrage. Did anybody pause to think about her privacy? Just because your smartphone can quietly take the picture and your social media app can post it instantly, should you not still remain concerned about some basic human protocol?