“IBM’s Watson supercomputer is already a Jeopardy! champion, and has now embarked on a second career in medicine, working with students at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University to improve its knowledge of medical concepts in a problem-based learning environment,” writes Jennifer Bresnick of the website EHRIntelligence.com.

Watson has the ability to formulate “inference paths,” and by feeding it thousands of gigabytes of medical information including medical dictionaries, studies, health records, findings, etc. it is hoped it will become a tool for doctors to check their own thinking against in order to provide the best health care decisions possible.

This new tool will not be available for use overnight as a multitude of tests and programming must still take place.

“Case Western students and staff will answer Watson’s questions and correct its mistakes to enable it to learn faster, hoping that someday its artificial intelligence will help save lives by returning the favor.”

Read the full story here.