Computers and human experts duke it out over who is better at diagnosing disease, interpreting images, or predicting protein structure
Dorothy Rosenthal tenses over her microscope, peering at the problematic nucleus on the Pap smear yet again. “It’s abnormal,” she decides, and then hesitates. “No, it’s...
Jul, 01, 2006
On the computer screen, vessels throb realistically with each pump of the heart while the river of blood swirls and pools at curves and intersections. This is a simulation built with SimVascular...
Apr, 01, 2007
Central repository of information on genes and proteins requires participation by the scientific community
If you build it, will they come? That’s the question on everyone’s mind after the launch of two pioneering initiatives in community annotation: WikiProteins and Gene Wiki, announced,...
Oct, 01, 2008
How increased coverage of the structure space is transforming the field of biology
When the human genome was completely sequenced in 2003, researchers were already pondering how biomedicine could make use of it. One hope was that the sequences would lead to a greater...
Jan, 01, 2010
There are numerous musculoskeletal modeling methods available to make predictions of muscle and joint contact forces. While such predictions can help improve treatments for movement-related disorders...
Jan, 02, 2012
Computation can speed up the time it takes to find new binding partners for old drugs
When cheap drugs are needed fast, researchers and drug companies are increasingly turning to an interesting short-cut: repurposing existing drugs for new uses. Because drugs exert multiple actions in...
Apr, 01, 2011
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic and IBM have each built computer pipelines for extracting useful information from unstructured notes in patient charts, such as physician’s notes and pathology...
Jul, 01, 2009
A computational model of alpha-synuclein as it aggregates
Under a microscope, the curious protein clumps that dot the brains of Parkinson’s patients stick out like the culprits they are. But no one has yet caught the protein—alpha-synuclein...
Jul, 01, 2007
An opportunity and a challenge
When discussing biocomputation startups, there’s one thing people agree on: These days, they don’t generate much excitement among venture capitalists.
“In the 1990s, there...
Apr, 01, 2007
To understand biology—and provide appropriate medical care—scientists need to understand interactions across multiple scales. Hence the Physiome.
This is the reality of human biology: events span a 109 range in lengthscale (molecular to organismal) and a 1014 range in timescale (molecular movement to years). To understand this biology—...
Jun, 01, 2010