IBM sends Watson on a genetic quest to find the best cancer treatments
Sure, IBM's Watson crunches data for mobile apps and powers food trucks, but its owners are constantly looking for important studies that can put its cognitive computing expertise to the test. With the recent announcement of a clinical trial studying ways to deliver personalized care to brain cancer patients, the Jeopardy-conquering supercomputer appears to have found that next major challenge. In collaboration with New York Genome Center, Watson will be tasked with trawling archives of medical literature and clinical data, using its patten recognition skills to identify the best cancer treatments based on a patient's genetic make-up. Teams of scientists had manually undertaken the process before, but it's exactly the kind of problem Watson was designed to help solve. IBM says it will begin a trial later this year and hopes to open its findings to doctors across the world.
