Watson, an artificial intelligence platform developed by IBM, will soon be used to assist doctors in Germany. Watson will be used at the Undiagnosed and Rare Diseases Centre at the University Hospital in Marburg.
Artificial Intelligence is currently widely used in healthcare. Google's AI DeepMind is being used for consultations in many hospitals in the UK. Likewise, Watson has been involved in a couple of cases. However; it is not clear how many cases it has diagnosed correctly.
The University Hospital of Giessen and Marburg was only opened in 2013, and currently has a waiting list of 6,000 patients at its hands.
"That number is almost a nightmare," Prof Dr. Jurgen Schafer, who heads the medical team at the hospital, told the BBC. "We need new ideas and new technology."
Patients who come to the hospital usually have a long history of undiagnosed conditions.
"It is not uncommon for our patients to have thousands of medical documents, leaving us overwhelmed not only by the large number of patients but also by the huge amount of data we have to review," Dr. Schafer said.
Watson will help in reading through those documents and comparing it with vast amounts of medical literature to make an accurate diagnosis.
However, there is some controversy regarding Watson. Critics are asking for people to an provide "informed" consent for their data to be fed to the AI system. In response, Prof Schafer has reiterated that all the records are anonymized when entering the system and the information never leaves the company.
Currently, the hospital is testing the AI by running 500 cases through Watson and calculating how many correct diagnoses it makes. They are also pushing for private hospitals to make use of the technology which will make diagnosing easy, efficient, and also less time consuming.