Putting data in the hands of doctors
Regina Barzilay is working with MIT students and medical doctors in an ambitious bid to revolutionize cancer care. She is relying on a tool largely unrecognized in the oncology world but deeply familiar to hers: machine learning. Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014. She soon learned that good data about the disease is hard to find. “You are desperate for information — for data,” she says now. “Should I use this drug or that? Is that treatment best? What are the odds of recurrence? Without reliable empirical evidence, your treatment choices become your own best guesses.” Across different areas of cancer care — be it diagnosis, treatment, or prevention — the data protocol is similar. Doctors start the process by mapping patient information into structured data by hand, and then run basic statistical analyses to identify correlations. The approach is primitive compared...