Healthcare IT Terms
What is Cognitive Computing?
A branch of artificial intelligence, cognitive computing uses machine learning and massively parallel computer processing to build on big data techniques. As typified by IBM Watson, the supercomputer that won the “Jeopardy” game in 2011, a cognitive computing system is a collection of overlapping, reasoning algorithms that can be expanded and updated as the system learns from experience. The applications of cognitive computing in healthcare include advanced natural language processing, the ability to convert unstructured data into structured data, the ability to search the medical literature quickly for clinical decision support, and the ability to correlate large numbers of unrelated data sources, including genomics and non-medical determinants of health, to find clinically useful connections.