IBM’s Watson supercomputer (and “Jeopardy!” winner) will be processing a lot of broken limbs and tumors in its ultimate quest for sentience. The company acquired Merge Healthcare, a medical imaging company, for $700 million last week. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company possesses an archive of some 30 billion anonymized medical images, which Watson will eventually process to recognize diseases, tumors, and other pathologies to better advise medical professionals. This is a step up from what Watson’s been doing before: natural language processing. Much like a souped-up Siri, Watson has processed enough language that it was able to process answers to Jeopardy! in 2011 and win by a large margin, despite some conversational hitches along the way.

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