IBM Academic initiative: Watson as a development tool for health applications.

In clinical practice, physicians often need to take decisions based both on previous experience and medical evidence. Such evidence is usually available in the form of clinical practice guidelines, that elaborate and summarize the knowledge contained in multiple documents. During clinical practice the synthetic format of medical guidelines is an advantage. However, when guidelines are used for educational purposes or when a clinician wants to gain deeper insight into a recommendation, it could be useful to examine all the guideline references relevant to a specific question. In this work we explored IBM Watson free services available thanks to the IBM Academic Initiative on the Bluemix cloud to develop a Webapp tha automatically extracts references from a document, searches and downloads them from Pubmed to build a corpus of knowledge which can be interrogated with free text questions. In our use case the reference are extracted from a recent italian compendium on emergency neurology. To evaluate the proposed approach we use the original guideline to check whether the retrieved text matches the actions mentioned in the recommendations.

IBM Academic initiative: utilizzo di Watson per lo sviluppo di applicazioni in sanità.