Sometimes the most difficult part of treating cancer is diagnosing it. The ability to recognize which forms of therapy will provide the best treatment is a skill that takes doctors years of experience and can still be wrong. This is why the CINJ (Cancer Institute of New Jersey), Rutgers University, and IBM are developing a computer system that will allow for more precise diagnosis of Cancer.
The computer system is envisioned as a tool that will allow Doctors to track the success rates of previous research. This will allow Doctors to tailor possible therapies to their patients. Additionally the system will let Doctors compare their patient’s samples against more than 100,000 samples within the system’s database, allowing them to immediately classify their patient’s cancer and discover how similar cancers have been treated and which therapies worked best. Besides from helping doctors treat cancer, the system may prove invaluable to researchers, allowing them to test many slivers of biopsies at once against a constantly updating set of samples.
Though using thousands of models to diagnose a single sample creates extremely accurate results, it is difficult to run such an intensive program on most computers. To combat this dilemma IBM has established the World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that draws processing power from thousands of volunteers across the world. This new joint effort could possibly allow any hospital to use this newfound method of diagnosing cancer.
The Link to the article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cancer-software-technology
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While researching West Nile Virus it was interesting to see that projects like this are being taken on in other fields of medicine.
ReplyDeleteIt's also cool how as time goes on the machine becomes more and more accurate.
ReplyDelete-Cyrus