2021-02-20 12:38:51
Yang Jing From
Aofei Temple Qubit Report | Public Account QbitAI
In the latest news, IBM intends to sell the Watson Health division.
This also means that IBM's 10-year AI medical path is over!
And this sale is exactly the same as IBM's previous series of divestitures and spin-offs, all in order to streamline the company's business and focus more on the cloud computing field.
Watson Health is the window through which IBM deploys AI medical care. It mainly uses AI to help hospitals, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies manage data and assist in diagnosis.
But for 6 years since its establishment, its annual revenue was only US $ 1 billion , accounting for less than 2% of the company's total revenue . This department previously spent more than $4 billion on acquisitions alone.
It's no wonder that IBM is thinking about selling.
In addition, because of cloud computing, its competitors, Microsoft and Amazon, have soared more than ten times in valuation .
So how this long-distance runner, who was once known as the AI medical firm, will go next is still unknown.
IBM's Ten Years of AI Healthcare
Watson, originally a computer system capable of answering natural language questions, was named after Thomas Watson, the founder and first CEO of IBM.
It was originally developed to answer questions in the American variety show "Dangerous Edge".
In 2011, Watson won the human champion contestant on the show, received a prize of 1 million US dollars, and has become famous ever since.
Subsequently, the blue giant IBM placed a heavy bet on AI medical care.
Watson announced his ambitious plan the next day after winning the championship: to make Watson an AI doctor in the future, he also promised to launch the first batch of medical and health products in the next 18-24 months.
In February 2013, IBM announced the first commercial application of Watson, which will be used in cooperation with WellPoint (now Anthem) for use management decisions in lung cancer treatment at a cancer center in New York City.
As a result, IBM has focused its research on tumor treatment.
In 2015, IBM established a dedicated department- Watson Health .
At that time, IBM's former CEO, Virginia Rometty, also called Watson Health the company's "moon landing plan", which shows IBM's determination to deploy medical care.
In 2016, Watson Health, which was established only two years ago, has more than 10,000 employees.
However, judging from a series of cooperation, the thunder is still loud and the rain is small.
Among them, there is a pilot program launched with MD Ander Cancer Center, with the purpose of "the mission of eradicating cancer." After spending 62 million US dollars, it was terminated because it did not meet expectations.
According to statistics from IEEE Spectrum in 2019, starting in 2011, only 5 of the 25 representative projects that IBM Watson has cooperated with other institutions have launched AI medical products.
In addition to cooperation, Watson Health has another idea, that is, acquisition, and the amount is not small.
The more well-known brand is Merge Healthcare , which can analyze mammograms and MRI, and has acquired nearly $1 billion.
ePhytel can help patients communicate, and IBM paid about $230 million for this.
There is also Truven Health Analytics , which is used to analyze complex medical data , and the acquisition amount is $ 2.6 billion .
But insiders said that the acquired company did not play a big role.
The products of IBM's Watson Health division are completely different from the AI doctors once envisaged.
It is more like an AI assistant that can perform certain daily tasks, but is not actually involved in the medical diagnosis process.
Controversy
Since its inception, Watson Health has been questioned by many parties.
In order to find the business case for AI healthcare, IBM has launched a dazzling series of projects that target different participants in the healthcare system: doctors, administrators, insurance companies, and patients.
In various attempts, IBM chose to let Watson's NLP understand medical texts instead of directly participating in medical imaging diagnosis.
Even the Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio is not optimistic about this AI medical model. He believes:
In medical text files, the artificial intelligence system cannot understand its ambiguity, nor can it understand the subtle clues that human doctors have noticed.
The result was naturally not ideal. Watson was unable to extract its own insights from new medical records in the medical literature. Researchers also found that it was unable to extract information from patients' electronic health records as expected.
The researchers realized that Watson could not compare new patients with cancer patients whose hidden patterns were previously discovered. IBM originally hoped that AI could imitate the capabilities of their expert oncologists and use previous results and experience to develop treatment strategies for new patients.
Herbert Chase, a professor in the Department of Medicine at Columbia University, had collaborated with IBM, hoping that Watson could become a "clinical diagnostic support" tool. Together, they worked on a prototype of a diagnostic tool. But the two sides parted ways in 2014 because Professor Chase was disappointed by Watson's slow progress.
In addition, Watson himself has made many mistakes.
In 2018, it was revealed that Watson had prescribed the wrong medicine to the patient, which could cause death in severe cases.
The drug has been used by more than 230 hospitals around the world, including 67 Chinese hospitals such as Peking University Cancer Hospital and Xuanwu Hospital, distributed in 22 provinces.
At the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Alok Gupta, vice president of IBM Watson Health Division, also put a huge PPT introduction, they have been involved in six major areas.
At that time, this department was rated as a firm "long-distance runner" in AI medical care.
It is also embarrassing to face the fate of selling now.
- Finish-