Blockchain-powered medical AI Skychain promises to beat IBM’s Watson Health Posted on : Dec 15 - 2017

Since its creation, artificial intelligence (AI) has found use in many different industries, including healthcare. The amount of medical data is astronomically huge and the problem of systematizing, storing, and, above all, using such data is of the utmost importance.

People have long hoped that someday, computers will make accurate diagnoses and eliminate medical errors. But no one has created an effective AI doctor yet. The Skychain project promises to revolutionize the healthcare industry, using AI and blockchain technology.

Skychain provides an infrastructure to host medical neural network, which will be trained using huge data sets (patients’ clinical records, medical reference data, and medical research data) uploaded to the system by data providers.

As a result, Skychain will make more accurate diagnoses, prescribe medical treatment, and adjust the prescribed treatment as soon as new information becomes available. Patients, doctors, and other (online) healthcare providers will be able to use Skychain, paying for each use of any neural network hosted by Skychain with its internal currency, Skycoin.

Skychain vs. Watson Health

Skychain is not the first project that introduces an AI-powered medical advisor. The most famous one is Watson Health, a supercomputer system built by IBM. Watson has shown some promise in medical diagnostics. But though Watson and Skychain have similar goals and operational features, Skychain has some substantial advantages. These advantages will help Skychain overcome the obstacles that so far prevented Watson from becoming the best doctor in the world.

Skychain’s first advantage stems from the amount of data necessary for neural network training. Artificial intelligence needs to learn all the time, so it needs huge amounts of data, which must be constantly updated.

The problem is that medical big data is very expensive. For example, IBM Watson Health gained access to 100 million patient cards by acquiring Truven Health Analytics, a leading provider of cloud-based healthcare data and analytics, for $2.6 billion. According to some experts, it would require an investment of about $137 billion to enable Watson to develop properly, but even a major company like IBM cannot afford that kind of outlay. View More