Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

This article was originally published by upmc.com and can be viewed in full

“Big data” researchers have received a $5 million, three-year state Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement, or CURE, grant to develop better methods for integrating, analyzing and modeling large volumes of diverse data on cancer patients. The goal is to produce more accurate predictions of patient outcomes and to enable clinicians to tailor care for each patient.

Breast and lung cancer will be investigated as clinical domains to develop the methods and software tools; however, the methods will be generalizable to other diseases.The basic approach will be to process raw data, such as gene sequence and expression data, to derive highly informative biological patterns in the data that are then used to predict patient outcomes. It is believed these biological patterns will predict outcomes significantly better than would using the raw data directly.

Predictions of clinical outcomes will assist physicians in devising treatment plans and help patients in making health care decisions. The patterns contained in the models also may spur biological insights into the diseases being modeled.

(0)(0)