A recent article from Stat reports on the use of the IBM Watson supercomputer in assisting in diagnosis and treatment of cancer. From the article:

The goal is to use Watson’s natural language processing to mine the medical literature and a patient’s records to provide treatment advice. And this month the Watson computer system is drastically expanding its reach — from one hospital in Thailand to six in India and a planned 21 more in China.

This instantiation of Watson, dubbed Watson for Oncology, is an artificial intelligence system that has access to millions of pages of medical textbooks and journal articles. Oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center trained the system to provide appropriate treatment recommendations by giving it descriptions of patients and then telling Watson the correct treatment.

The use of supercomputers is an exciting development in the healthcare field. As computing resources grow, and Artificial Intelligence grows, one can easily see a future where AIs diagnose and treat disease in humans.

Source: https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/19/ibm-watson-cancer-asia/