It’s impossible to predict what the hottest new tools will be, but here are a few gems that caught our attention
Many experimental researchers rely on computational tools to push the pace and productivity of laboratory research. It’s impossible to predict what the hottest new tools will be, but this...
Apr, 01, 2011
The complexity and variability of aging itself, along with the fragmented nature of researchers’ current understanding of aging, call for tools that can help scientists dig through mounds of data to find often subtle connections.
Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France rode a bicycle until she was 100 years old. When she gave up smoking at age 117, her doctor suspected it was out of pride. (She couldn’t see well enough...
Apr, 01, 2008
How social media sites are rapidly doing unique research on large cohorts
It has become commonplace for people to use social media to share their healthcare stories, seek a community of individuals with the same diseases, and learn about treatment options. All this...
Jan, 02, 2012
Computation helps evaluate the nature of the NIH research portfolio in ways that were previously very difficult.
What biomedical research does the federal government fund? How is it allocated across important diseases? Has that changed over time? Answering these questions at any level of detail is tougher than...
Jun, 08, 2012
As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007
Using computational models, researchers are gaining traction toward understanding what makes a stem cell a stem cell; how gene expression drives stem cell differentiation; why studying stem cell heterogeneity is important; and, ultimately, how stem cells control their fate.
To the casual observer, stem cells offer the almost magical promise of—Voila!—turning into exactly the kind of cell needed to repair an injured spinal cord or replace a damaged organ. And...
Apr, 01, 2010
Seeking a non-invasive approach to cancer diagnosis and prognosis
In a radiological image, a tumor’s edges might appear fuzzy or crisp; its shape could range from oval to many-lobed; and its density and texture might vary across the tumor. To determine...
Jun, 19, 2013
Using natural language processing to find necessary samples
To discover links between genes and disease, researchers typically recruit individual patients with and without the disease of interest; have them sign consent forms; take their medical histories;...
Jan, 01, 2010
Supercomputers open up new horizons, offering the possibility of discovering new ways to understand life’s complexity
Their very names sound like dinosaurs. Teracomputers. Petacomputers. These are, in fact, the dinosaurs of the digital world—monstrous, hungry and powerful. But unlike the extinct...
Oct, 01, 2006
What can open-source software do for biomedical research? Based on our experience at the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC), we believe that open source software can be used very...
Mar, 01, 2009