Computerworld - September 26, 2011

Micro Burst

BETWEEN THE LINES

By John Klossner

BROWSER BACKSLIDE

Internet Explorer’s market share will fall below

50%

by June 2012 if current
browser usage trends
continue.

SOURCE: NE T APPLICATIONS

MOBILE & WIRELESS

Android: King of the Smartphones

HEALTHCARE

IBM’s Watson to Diagnose Patients

WATSON, IBM’s game-show- playing supercomputer, will soon try its hand at helping physicians diagnose and treat their patients.

IBM announced earlier this year that healthcare would be the first commercial application for the computer, which defeated two human champions on the popular television game show “Jeopardy!” in February.

IBM and WellPoint — Blue Cross Blue Shield’s largest health plan — this month agreed to jointly create applications that can be used by doctors and other medical personnel.

The software will use the concept of “evidence-based medicine,” which centers around best practices in treating patients. One simple example of evidence-based medicine would be placing someone who’s had a heart attack on an aspirin regimen.

Watson consists of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers powered by 8-core processors — four in each machine — for a total of 32

processors per machine. The servers are virtualized with a kernel-based virtual machine scheme, resulting in a server cluster with a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops. (A teraflop is one trillion operations per second.)

That horsepower can help medical professionals cull through a lot of information quickly. Watson can search 200 million pages of data and provide responses in just seconds.

“Imagine having the ability to take in all
the information around a patient’s medical
care — symptoms, findings, patient inter-
views and diagnostic studies,” said Dr. Sam
Nussbaum, WellPoint’s chief medical officer,
in a statement. “Then, imagine using Watson
analytic capabilities to consider all of the
prior cases, the state-of-the-art clinical knowl-
edge in the medical literature and clinical
best practices to help a physician advance a
diagnosis and advance a course of treatment.”
WellPoint expects to begin using Watson
in clinical pilots early next year.

Android won the smartphone OS war this year in definitive fashion, capturing 39% of the market, according to IDC. The research firm predicted that Android-based smartphones will dominate the market in 2015 with a nearly 44% share, while Apple and Research In Motion will battle for second place.

Android easily passed last year’s leader, Nokia’s Symbian OS, whose market share fell from 36% in 2010 to a projected 21%. Android’s share jumped more than 15 percentage points, from 23% in 2010, IDC said.

RIM’s BlackBerry operating system will see its market share slip from 16% last year to 14% in 2011, while the share of Apple’s iOS will increase from 16% last year to 18% in 2011, IDC predicted. Meanwhile, Windows Phone will wind up with less than a 4% share, since it will soon replace Symbian for Nokia.

Regardless of winners and losers, there’s been substantial growth in smartphone use worldwide. IDC said almost 305 million devices shipped in 2010 and projected that this year’s shipments will hit 472 million — a growth rate of 55%.