IBM's Watson supercomputer (and "Jeopardy!" winner) will be processing a lot of broken limbs and tumors in its ultimate quest for sentience.The company acquired Merge Healthcare, a medical imaging company, for $700 million last week. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company possesses an archive of some 30 billion anonymized medical images, which Watson will eventually process to recognize diseases, tumors, and other pathologies to better advise medical professionals.This is a step up from what Watson's been doing before: natural language processing. Much like a souped-up Siri, Watson has processed enough language that it was able to process answers to Jeopardy! in 2011 and win by a large margin, despite some conversational hitches along the way.
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But now, with billions of images to sort through, the supercomputer will learn "to see," as IBM puts it."The volume of medical images can be overwhelming to even the most sophisticated specialists—radiologists in some hospital emergency rooms are presented with as many as 100,000 images a day," Merge VP Michael Klozotsky said in a statement.And because of that volume, it makes total sense to have a computer cross-reference them. It might not be long before we phone in Dr. Watson to see if it was really lupus all along.