Concordance as evidence in the Watson for Oncology decision‑support system

02/25/2020
by   Tupasela, et al.
0

Machine learning platforms have emerged as a new promissory technology that some argue will revolutionize work practices across a broad range of professions, including medical care. During the past few years, IBM has been testing its Watson for Oncology platform at several oncology departments around the world. Published reports, news stories, as well as our own empirical research show that in some cases, the levels of concordance over recommended treatment protocols between the platform and human oncologists have been quite low. Other studies supported by IBM claim concordance rates as high as 96%. We use the Watson for Oncology case to examine the practice of using concordance levels between tumor boards and a machine learning decision-support system as a form of evidence. We address a challenge related to the epistemic authority between oncologists on tumor boards and the Watson Oncology platform by arguing that the use of concordance levels as a form of evidence of quality or trustworthiness is problematic. Although the platform provides links to the literature from which it draws its conclusion, it obfuscates the scoring criteria that it uses to value some studies over others. In other words, the platform “black boxes” the values that are coded into its scoring system.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
02/13/2021

A Bayesian social platform for inclusive and evidence-based decision making

Against the backdrop of a social media reckoning, this paper seeks to de...
research
04/03/2019

Automated Fact Checking in the News Room

Fact checking is an essential task in journalism; its importance has bee...
research
06/23/2020

CrossPath: Top-down, Cross Data Type, Multi-Criterion Histological Analysis by Shepherding Mixed AI Models

Data-driven AI promises support for pathologists to discover sparse tumo...
research
04/06/2020

Levels of Analysis for Machine Learning

Machine learning is currently involved in some of the most vigorous deba...
research
10/18/2017

Can Machine Learning Create an Advocate for Foster Youth?

Statistics are bleak for youth aging out of the United States foster car...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset