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Scientific Imaging Explores Many Worlds
Features
"To understand the practical problems the world faces, we first need to comprehend the underlying, purely scientific problems," Hill said.
Medical Uses
Rosetta Inpharmatics (Seattle, WA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck & Co. (Whitehouse Station, NJ), in collaboration with the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI, Amsterdam), is developing a tool that enables clinicians to determine a breast cancer patient's prognosis. The progrnosis is based on the gene expression profile of the primary tumor.
According to Dr. Hongyue Dai, director of custom analysis, it is difficult to determine the best course of treatment for a patient with breast cancer. Patients at the same stage of the disease and receiving the same treatment can have markedly different outcomes. Chemotherapy and hormone therapy reduce the risk of distant metastases by about one third, but studies show that 70 to 80 percent of patients receiving this treatment would have survived without it, says Dai.
Dai and his colleagues were asked to develop a tool that would enable cancer researchers to determine which genes in breast cancer patients were strong predictors of future metastases. To do this, they used The MathWorks' MATLAB Tools products. The software coupled statistics capabilities with the ability to handle large data sets rapidly.
NKI researchers collaborating with the Rosetta team followed the progress of a group of 117 patients for more than five years. They examined the original DNA samples of patients who had a poor outcome in order to identify genes whose expression level was associated with that result.
