Officially sworn in this past October as the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Ned Sharpless, MD, believes that artificial intelligence will "probably" be in the future of cancer care. Sharpless, whose professional experience in cancer research spans across decades, said in a recent interview with STAT News that AI will be most helpful when treating a surplus number of patients or using genomically guided therapy for treatment. Specifically, an AI tool to help radiologists or pathologists to read chest x-rays and other images will most likely be an integral technology in the future of oncology, Sharpless explained.

Ned Sharpless has been in cancer research for decades, most recently as the director of the University of North Carolina's Lineberger Cancer Center. But when he took the helm of the National Cancer Institute in October, he realized it would take time to get to know the $5.5 billion federal agency. So he embarked on a listening tour that ended up lasting six months, talking to investigators, patients, research advocates, and agency administrators. Seven months into his tenure at NCI, Sharpless sat down with STAT on Wednesday to talk about his new role, using artificial intelligence in cancer care, and how the NIH's "All of Us" precision medicine project could play into the NCI's big data aspirations. Try it FREE for 30 days and cancel anytime!

Over a three-day period in February, millions of people watched as the supercomputer steadily triumphed over Jennings and Rutter, beating the men at complicated clues like "A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called this'of the Hedgehog'?" You don't have this sleep disorder that can make sufferers nod off while standing up" (response: "What is narcolepsy?"). Watson also made some funny mistakes, like when it responded "What Is Toronto?????" to a clue about the names of a city's airports, while his human opponents correctly met the prompt with "What is Chicago?" In the end, Watson racked up $77,147 to Jennings's and Rutter's respective $24,000 and $21,600; IBM was awarded $1 million to give to charity; Jennings jokingly welcomed "our new computer overlords"; and Jeopardy!got a ratings spike. At the time, IBM was estimated to have spent somewhere between $900 million and $1.8 billion developing Watson's artificial-intelligence technology and, as far as the public could see, all the company had to show for it was an elaborate parlor trick. "IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek," wrote Jennings in a Slate pieceabout his encounter with the machine. "The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson." Five years later, that future appears to be knocking at the door. While Watson's servers and memory have the capacity to process the entire American Library of Congress, the system, as IBM research head John Kelly put it to Charlie Rose on a recent 60 Minutes, "has no inherent intelligence as it starts.

It helps us drive our cars, use our cell phones and socialize online, but artificial intelligence is beginning to make a big difference in cancer, too. And that may be just the beginning, Charlie Rose reports on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, Oct. 9 at 7:30 p.m. ET and 8 p.m. PT. Watson, the IBM technology, is doing much more now than beating humans on TV's "Jeopardy!" Five years after that, the A.I. technology has the ability to learn and analyze mountains of data. It is now becoming a crucial tool for doctors.