Everyone agrees health care in the United States is a colossal mess, and IBM is betting that artificially intelligent supercomputers are just what the doctor ordered. But some health professionals say robodoctors are just flashy toys.

Such are the deep questions raised by the medical incarnation of Watson, the language-processing, information-hunting AI that debuted in 2011 on the quiz show Jeopardy!, annihilating the best human player ever and inspiring geek dreams of where its awesome computational power might be focused next.

IBM has promised a Watson that will in microseconds trawl the worlds medical knowledge and advise doctors. It sounds great in principle, but the project hasnt yet produced peer-reviewed clinical results, and the journey from laboratory to bedside is long. Still, some doctors say Watson will be fantastically useful.

Its not humanly possible to practice the best possible medicine. We need machines, said Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and member of IBMs Watson Healthcare Advisory Board. A machine like that, with massively parallel processing, is like 500,000 of me sitting at Google and Pubmed, trying to find the right information.

Others, including physician Mark Graber, a former chief of the Veterans Administration hospital in Northport, New York, are less enthused. Doctors have enough knowledge, said Graber, who now heads the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine. In medicine, thats not the problem we face.

Chase and Graber embody the essential tensions of applying Watson to healthcare, even if the machine is inarguably a wonder of artificial intelligence. Winning Jeopardy! might seem like a trivial, so to speak, accomplishment, but it was an enormous computational achievement.

Watson wasnt programmed with the information it needed, but given the cognitive tools necessary to acquire the knowledge itself, teasing out answers to complicated questions from vast amounts of electronic information. And it did this not in response to computer-language queries posed through an arcane interface, but with everyday conversational English.

'A machine like that is like 500,000 of me sitting at Google and Pubmed.'

After all, doctors make mistakes. Lots of mistakes. Enough to kill about 200,000 Americans annually. Experts put misdiagnosis rates around 10 percent, a number that varies widely by condition but in some situations, such as complicated cancers, goes far higher. Watsons programmers say the machine might prevent many of those mistakes. It would constantly be updated with the latest medical knowledge, bringing to every doctor insights that often take years to filter out of academia, and merging those insights with each patients own data.

We have all these different dimensions of data about an individual. How do we match the different characteristics they have personal, medical with a set of knowledge, of information, that is going to define what the best thing for them to do is? said Basit Chaudhry, lead research clinician for Watson, at the Wired Health Conference on Oct. 16.

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Paging Dr. Watson: Artificial Intelligence As a Prescription for Health Care