Report: IBM’s Watson for Oncology not living up to “lofty expectations”

After 3 years on the market, IBM’s Watson for Oncology is not living up to the hype it’s been sold under in its battle to find a cure for cancer, according to a new STAT report.

So far, the system is still struggling to learn about different forms of cancer and has only been adopted by a few dozen hospitals, according to the report, with hospitals outside the US complaining that the system is biased towards American patients and their methods of care.

STAT reports that it examined the company’s efforts in oncology across the world, and found that IBM “unleashed a product without fully assessing the challenges of deploying it in hospitals globally.”

“While it has emphatically marketed Watson for cancer care, IBM hasn’t published any scientific papers demonstrating how the technology affects physicians and patients. As a result, its flaws are getting exposed on the front lines of care by doctors and researchers who say that the system, while promising in some respects, remains undeveloped,” STAT wrote in its report.

The Watson for Oncology offering operates by using the cloud-based supercomputer to intake large amounts of data, covering doctors notes, medical studies and clinical guidelines. This data, however, does not generate new insights itself, nor does Watson – instead, insights are based “exclusively on training by human overseers,” STAT reports.

And those insights are fed in individually, and cover how patients with specific characteristics are best treated, and come from a few dozen physicians at a single US hospital.

The system is making improvements, and by the end of the year, IBM said it will be able to offer guidance about treatment for 12 cancers which account for 80% of the world’s cancer cases, STAT reports.

But Watson is still a ways off from the company’s claims, according to the report.

“Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company’s claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, “even new approaches” to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn’t create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term,” STAT reports.

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