CLEVELAND, Ohio --

, the super-smart, Jeopardy!-winning,

computer, is headed off to medical school.

In Cleveland.

IBM is sending its precocious computer to the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.

The announcement was released early this morning by IBM and the Clinic and will be followed up at the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit today with a 4 p.m. panel discussion on the role of Watson in the future of healthcare.

Nobody expects the giant thinking machine to graduate in a few years, don a white coat, walk into an operating room and perform surgery.

The goal is to fill Watson's brain with journal articles, conference papers and more medical research than any human could possible cram into his head, then have it come up with a list of possible diagnoses to help doctors make better, faster, more accurate decisions about how to treat their patients.

"It will be a partner, a good sidekick," said Dr. Neil Mehta, director of education technology at Lerner and leader of the project for the school.

"It will be there to help us make sure that we're not missing possibilities, that we're doing a more complete search [of the research] and presenting it in an easy-to-understand manner."

What Watson will do

"Our view is that Watson is never making the final decision, rather it's providing access to all kinds of information sources . . . and analyzing that kind of unstructured information and using it to evaluate possible diagnoses and treatment and giving that information back to the physician."

-- Eric Brown, a manager on the IBM Watson research team

Like it did with questions on Jeopardy!, Watson will tell doctors how confident it is that its diagnoses are correct. And Lerner, Mehta said, will help boost its confidence.

"This is the next big challenge for Watson and IBM," Mehta said. "They have built a second-generation software and they want us to help refine these algorithms to help Watson build its confidence in its answers."

That's not all Watson will do.

It will also provide students with the data it used to get to its answers, which, in turn will help them learn.

Like many of those students, it will conduct research, too.

Lerner medical students will be divided into two groups. A test group that studies with Watson at its side and a control group that studies on its own. And faculty will see which group performs best.

IBM is counting on Watson's group making better decisions and its computer improving medical care.

The technology and consulting company with more than 400,000 employees and $107 billion in revenue in 2011, hopes the Clinic and Watson can work together to create sophisticated software -- a vast reference library that will advance treatment for patients -- that it can sell to healthcare providers around the world.

IBM won't disclose terms, but company officials called this a research-driven collaboration that will advance Watson's ability to help humans make better decisions when it comes to their health.

As smart as Watson is, don't count on it graduating anytime soon.

"Right now we have a three-year plan in front of us," Mehta said. "We probably will be doing some pilot studies early next year."

Those studies will help Watson learn a next-generation technology that IBM calls TeachWatson and improve its Deep Question Answering technology in the field of medicine.

Lerner's 160 students and Watson will pose questions to each other to help the computer become a more analytical thinker, refine its ability to generate hypotheses, rank those hypotheses and come up with answers.

"Every question that is asked is going to help Watson," Mehta said. "He's going to say, 'Oh, this is how humans think.'

"There is so much synergy here because the way students learn right now in the problem-based setting is very similar to the way Watson is being programmed to think."

The New York State-based company chose Lerner over the 170 med schools across the country because it likes its problem-based method of teaching.

"When we want them to learn about the heart and lungs, we give them a case: An elderly gentleman is out shoveling snow and gets chest pain. Students have to work out the problem," explained Dr. James Young, executive dean of Lerner.

That, IBM officials say, is how it wants Watson to think.

"This problem-based learning approach in working with their medical students fits very nicely with the work that we're doing with Watson and the way we want to continue to drive and adapt the technology," said Eric Brown, a manager on the IBM Watson research team.

And Young hopes that will lead to diagnostic suggestions by Watson that are "right on target."

"Obviously Watson's not going to be able to do a cardiac catheterization, but he can clearly say 'This person needs a cardiac catheterization,' " Young said.

"If we can get Watson to give us information in the health-care arena like we've seen with more general sorts of knowledge information, I think it's going to be an extraordinary tool for clinicians and a huge advancement in IT approaches to health care."