Briefs

Aug. 4, 2004 -- Information Week -- By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee Mayo Clinic and IBM are applying the kind of pattern recognition and data mining used to personalize direct marketing to health records to personalize treatment. Hoping to customize medical treatments to individual patients--such as picking the best chemotherapy for a colon cancer patient with a specific genetic marker--Mayo Clinic and IBM are trying to apply pattern recognition and data mining to electronic records of about 4.4 million Mayo patients.

For the last three years, Mayo and IBM have been working to replicate into one database clinical data from five data sources, which include digitized patient files, lab results, X-rays, and electrocardiograms from Mayo's hospitals in Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota. In our lifetimes, each of us generates about 1 terabyte of medical data, from X-rays to test results.

Under an extension to that project disclosed Wednesday, Mayo and IBM will take that medical data and apply custom algorithms to identify patterns that could lead to better treatment decisions for individual patients and help researchers develop new therapies, says Drew Flaada, director of the IBM and Mayo collaboration and director of IBM life sciences.

Here is the rest of the story.