Watson in the examining room?

Are you ready for Watson to join you and your doctor in the examining room? That could be the outcome of a collaboration under way between Watson's creators at IBM and experts at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine. They have begun work on merging the speech recognition and question-answering skills of Watson — the computer that beat two humans on "Jeopardy!" this week — with the vast stores of clinical knowledge and analytical skills in the medical profession. If it all works out, the end product could be a "Dr. Watson" in hospitals and physicians' offices. "In the future, I see the software sitting with the physician as he is interviewing the patient, and processing information in real time, and correlating that with the patient's medical record and other records," said Dr. Eliot Siegel, director of the Maryland Imaging Research Technologies Lab at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.