After A Year Of Medical School, IBM's Watson Passes First Milestone

Andrew Nusca | ZDNet | February 8, 2013

Summary: IBM's year-long residency at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Wellpoint is finally producing cognitive computing breakthroughs (and two new products).

IBM's Watson has made its first commercially-developed cognitive computing breakthroughs, the company announced this morning. They arrive after more than a year of training with healthcare partners WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Watson, the intelligent supercomputer, has been studying up on oncology and utilization management in an effort to improve the quality and speed of patient care through personalization. Clinicians and technicians have spent thousands of hours to date helping Watson learn to process analyze and interpret the meaning of complex clinical information using the natural language processing it is known for.