Predictive Medicine - Science Nation NSF - National Science Foundation

Some chronic conditions, such as the autoimmune disease scleroderma, are especially difficult to treat because patients exhibit highly variable symptoms, complications and treatment responses. The process of finding an effective treatment for an individual can be frustrating for doctors, and painful and expensive for patients. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), computer scientist and professor Suchi Saria, with Dr. Fredrick Wigley and an interdisciplinary team of experts at Johns Hopkins University, is leading a groundbreaking effort using Big Data to ease some of that pain for scleroderma patients. The team s research is in machine learning, a subfield of computer science and statistics that allows machines to learn from data. The team designs statistical algorithms that enable computers to analyze large volumes of medical records and identify subgroups of patients with similar patterns of disease progression.