IBM's Top 5 Innovations For The Future


#4 Sight: “Read” the pictures

We live in a world of pictures with approximately 500 billion photos taken a year and 72 hours of video getting uploaded to YouTube every minute. Computers today only understand pictures by the text we use to tag or title them; the majority of the information -- the actual content of the image -- is a mystery.

According to IBM, in the next five years, systems will not only be able to look at and recognize the contents of images and visual data, they will turn the pixels into meaning, beginning to make sense out of it similar to the way a human views and interprets a photograph. In the future, “brain-like” capabilities will let computers analyze features such as color, texture patterns or edge information and extract insights from visual media. This will have a profound impact for industries such as healthcare, retail and agriculture.

Within five years, these capabilities will be put to work in healthcare by making sense out of massive volumes of medical information such as MRIs, CT scans, X-Rays and ultrasound images to capture information tailored to particular anatomy or pathologies.  What is critical in these images can be subtle or invisible to the human eye and requires careful measurement. By being trained to discriminate what to look for in images -- such as differentiating healthy from diseased tissue -- and correlating that with patient records and scientific literature, systems that can “see” will help doctors detect medical problems with far greater speed and accuracy.

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