We will be cured by the best physicians (but I am not sure if they will be human)
In Germany, there is an endocrinologist named Jürgen Sch?fer who is leading a 1-year project in order to figure out if IBM's Watson computer can help cure rare diseases. At the University Hospital of Marburg’s Centre for Undiagnosed and Rare Diseases (known as ZusE in German) research is being conducted on rare, often unexplained illnesses. An example of this is endocarditis; An inflammation of the inner heart.
Dr. Sch?fer is working with IBM artificial intelligence to see if they can find the causes and cures for these rare diseases. They are extracting thousands of data from 500 patients with rare diseases, who often had already visited 20 doctors of more, and who were not able to cure their disease. They collect data about their symptoms, lifestyle, medication etc. Then, they anonymize the data and let Watson find patterns and relations between these symptoms, causes, and diseases. This way they hope to pinpoint certain signs as actual causes of a disease.
Tobias Müller, a colleague of Dr. Sch?fer commented: “We had one patient with inexplicable gut symptoms who, it turned out, kept an aquarium. He had caught the tropical disease bilharzia from his water snails.”
If and when we will be cured by artificial doctors depends on one thing: Can we feed systems like Watson with enough real life data from patients diseases, hobbies, lifestyles, family relationships etc. in order to enable the system to draw statistically correct conclusions? So the question is: Will we be willing to provide our (anonymized) data about our lives to help medical science advance much faster? The more data we provide, the faster these diseases can be cured.
Several companies, such as Google and Facebook, already have a vast amount of data about our lives, but the question again is if we are willing to allow these companies to use them. If all data are made anonymous, there should be no problem. The next question is: do we trust these companies enough to hand over the details about our lives?
Dr. Sch?fer is now also called, Dr. House.