IBM's cognitive supercomputer, called Watson, famously won Jeopardy two years ago. That was just the beginning. IBM has built six Watsons in the last year, deploying them to do what the system was designed for: Give healthcare professionals fast answers to complex medical questions.

Both the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and WellPoint have gotten themselves a Watson, and have been training them in the last year to apply its learning algorithms and vast computing power to helping patients. Similar to Siri, Watson was designed to give useful answers to natural-language questions. Rather than spitting back a series of links like a traditional search engine, Watson tries to find the single, correct answer to whatever it's asked.

For Memorial Sloan-Kettering, that means giving Watson more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, two million pages of text from medical journals, and 1.5 million patient records to sift through before it was ready to answer real questions about cancer treatment. WellPoint got Watson up to speed with a similar data dump, including 14,700 hours of hands-on training from nurses.

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As a result of all this programming and testing, the two companies are introducing a Watson-powered product, Interactive Care Insights for Oncology. It'll be the first Watson-based adviser for doctors, available via the cloud, designed to help them find the best treatment options for cancer patients. Lung cancer is the first target, but other types of cancer will follow.

WellPoint will offer two other Watson-based systems, an Interactive Care Guide and Interactive Care Reviewer, which are both intended to speed up initial testing for individuals.

Besides faster medical answers, Watson promises to address three issues in medicine: First, it can stay apprised of all new medical evidence in any field better than doctors, who typically spend just 5 hours a week learning new medicine. Second, it can take into account a patient's entire medical history, giving truly individualized care. Third, it frees medical expertise from location — since Watson is cloud-based, a patient in Bangladesh can potentially receive the same diagnosis as someone in New York City.

"The power of Watson expands access to care," Tracey Weisberg, medical oncology president of the Maine Center for Cancer, said at an IBM event to unveil the new Watson-based products. "I believe it has the power to personalize each patient's cancer care."

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