Cancer's "World Wide Web"

[rwingo]

There's an interesting article in the most recent issue of Technology Review that touches on the possibilities of data mining in large databases of medical information:

Originally Posted by Technology Review, March/April 2006

For several years, clinicians and computer scientists in the U.S. and abroad have been trying to improve cancer care—from diagnosis to treatment—by building vast, interconnected databases full of patient information. They call these repositories "medical grids" and envision the day when a physician in Strasbourg or New Delhi can see, for example, that an indecipherable image of a patient's lung is very similar to that of a San Francisco patient, whose case history could inform the decision to perform a biopsy.

...

With the database now largely in place, testing is imminent. The image collection is intended to encourage and facilitate research into new software that can automatically compare images of lungs with those already in the database. In such software, algorithms will search for commonalities and build a directory of the likeliest matches. Clinicians in offices and hospitals will be able to contrast the resulting lung images with the scans they need to evaluate.

Of course, these kinds of advancements will rely heavily on successful implementations of information systems that utilize many industry standards such as HL7, ICD-9, etc... and the successful installation of theses information systems will most definately rely on healthcare informatics and nursing informatics professionals!