Watson: Beyond Jeopardy!

Article history: Received 28 May 2012 Accepted 23 June 2012 Available online 7 August 2012 This paper presents a vision for applying the Watson technology to health care and describes the steps needed to adapt and improve performance in a new domain. Specifically, it elaborates upon a vision for an evidence-based clinical decision support system, based on the DeepQA technology, that affords exploration of a broad range of hypotheses and their associated evidence, as well as uncovers missing information that can be used in mixed-initiative dialog. It describes the research challenges, the adaptation approach, and finally reports results on the first steps we have taken toward this goal. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.