Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
From Moneyball to quantitative financial analysis, many industries mine vast amounts of data for their use and the medical field is no exception.
Recently, a group of London doctors announced that they have amassed 1,600 3D videos of beating hearts in hopes of finding new insights and medical treatments.
Declan O’Regan, a participating researcher from the Imperial College London, said that this new strategy is likely to expose much more than normal clinical trials, which usually convey fairly small amounts of health data over the span of many years.
“There is a really complicated relationship between people’s genes and heart disease, and we are still trying to unravel what that is,” O’Reagan told the BBC. “But by getting really clear 3D pictures of the heart we hope to be able to get a much better understanding of the cause and effect of heart disease and give the right patients the right treatment at the right time.”
The research program intends to gather data on so many hearts that commonalities emerge. O’Regan said this type of work will become standard practice in medicine relatively soon.
“There are often subtle signs of early disease that are really difficult to pick up even if you know what to look for,” he said. “A computer is very sensitive to picking up subtle signs of a disease before they become a problem.”
Other Big Data efforts
Another big data medical program is taking place at the European Bioinfomatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, England. At the EBI, the genetic codes of tens of thousands of different plants and animals are recorded in hopes of furthering our understanding of genetics.
Ewan Birney, a researcher director at the EBI, said big data is already starting to change the way research is carried out.
“Suddenly, we don’t have to be afraid of measuring lots and lots of things – about humans, about oceans, about the Universe – because we know we can be confident that we can collect that data and extract some knowledge from it,” he said.
Two of the biggest challenges facing big data research efforts are devising an effective way to manage the data and how to analyze it. However, once scientists working on a project solve these challenges – groundbreaking discoveries can result, as evidenced by the recent discovery of the Higgs boson particle by researchers at CERN in Switzerland.
“(B)y using larger amounts of data, we can discover new things, and so what will be found? That is an open question,” said Paul Flicek of the EBI.
“We are not going to slow down generating new data,” Flicek continued. “The fact that we have demonstrated that we can generate a lot of this data; we can sequence these genomes. We are never going to stop doing that and so it opens up so many more exciting things.
“We can learn new things and we can see things we have never seen before,” he added.
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