The Daily Telegraph

IBM under fire over incorrect cancer advice from AI system

- By Natasha Bernal

IBM’S Watson supercompu­ter has come under fire for providing incorrect and unsafe healthcare treatment advice to cancer patients.

The system is being used in 230 hospitals around the world to help doctors diagnose patients. It does so by using artificial intelligen­ce to analyse their medical data in combinatio­n with informatio­n from hundreds of medical journals. Since 2015, Watson has given advice on nearly 60,000 patients.

A report from health website Stat News states that internal documents shared by Andrew Norden, IBM Watson’s former deputy health chief, provided strong criticism of the Watson for Oncology system.

It stated that the “often inaccurate” suggestion­s made by the product raise “serious questions about the process for building content and the underlying technology”.

For example, Watson reportedly suggested giving the drug bevacizuma­b to a 65-year-old man diagnosed with lung cancer, who also seemed to have severe bleeding. One of the side effects of the drug is that can lead to “severe or fatal haemorrhag­e”.

According to the documents reviewed by Stat, a doctor at Florida’s Jupiter Hospital told IBM: “We bought it for marketing and with hopes that you would achieve the vision. We can’t use it for most cases.”

According to the report, the documents blame training provided by IBM’S engineers and doctors from a private clinic, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, which had partnered with IBM on a project to adapt Watson to the healthcare sector.

IBM Watson gained worldwide fame when it won American game show Jeopardy in 2011 and was adapted to be used in different sectors.

In healthcare, Watson was adapted to assist in diagnoses and treatment of patients, identifyin­g key pieces of data through the descriptio­n of symptoms and mining patient data to find relevant facts about family history, current medication­s and other existing conditions.

IBM boosted the capacity of the Watson supercompu­ter by acquiring medical imaging group Merge Healthcare for $1bn (£760m) in 2015.

At the time, IBM said: “The planned acquisitio­n bolsters IBM’S strategy to add rich image analytics with deep learning to the Watson Health platform – in effect, advancing Watson beyond natural language and giving it the ability to ‘see’.”

According to IBM Watson can then provide a list of potential diagnoses along with a score that indicates the level of confidence for each hypothesis.

Children’s hospital Alder Hey in Liverpool turned to IBM’S artificial intelligen­ce system Watson in 2017 for its analytics needs in a bid to become the UK’S first cognitive hospital.

IBM’S AI healthcare propositio­n received a blow last year after the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre put their partnershi­p on hold after four years of research. After four years, the partnershi­p did not produce a tool that was ready to go beyond pilot tests, according to website Technology Review.

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