The New York Times cites SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner’s research on networks in health data as an example of an emerging approach to medical treatment.
The article, "Can Big Data Tell Us What Clinical Trials Don’t," describes the nascent practice of using hospital records and other sources of health data to inform medical diagnoses and treatments. Doctors and researchers can mine data to investigate meaningful correlations for which no clinical trials exist, though the practice is fraught with privacy concerns.
Thurner’s work at the Medical University of Vienna identifies networks of relationships in a database of millions of health insurance claims, promising a tool for predicting the health of certain populations over time. His work is a formal example of a data-informed approach to medicine that “may eventually become mainstream,” according to the article.
Read the article in the New York Times (October 6, 2014)