Smart medicine is coming of age, but will doctors bite?

After months of cancer treatment at the University of Tokyo Hospital, the patient – a woman in her 60s – was not getting much better. So the medical team plugged the woman's symptoms into IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that once famously trounced human champs in the TV quiz show Jeopardy! Watson rifled through its storehouse of oncology data and announced that she had a rare form of secondary leukemia. The team changed the treatment, and she was soon out of hospital. Watson spotted in minutes what could otherwise have taken weeks to diagnose, one doctor told The Japan Times. "It might be an exaggeration to say AI saved her life, but it surely gave us the data we needed in an extremely speedy fashion."