The Latest Medical Breakthrough In Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made By A Computer Program
New software sifts through the information gathered in long forgotten studies and finds new avenues for researchers to pursue—like a new advance in treating spinal injuries.
Doctors have just discovered a previously unknown relationship between the long-term recovery of spinal cord injury victims and high blood pressure during their initial surgeries. This may seem like a small bit of medical news—though it will have immediate clinical implications—but what's important is how it was discovered in the first place.
This wasn’t the result of a new, long-term study, but a meta-analysis of $60 million worth of basic research written off as useless 20 years ago by a team of neuroscientists and statisticians led by the University of California San Francisco and partnering with the software firm Ayasdi, using mathematical and machine learning techniques that hadn’t been invented yet when the trials took place. The process was outlined in a paper published today in Nature Communications, and hints at the possibility of medical breakthroughs lurking in the data of failed experiments.
"What was thought to have been a boondoggle turns out to have great value," says Adam Ferguson, a principal investigator at UCSF’s Brain and Spinal Injury Center and one of the paper’s authors. Just how much is unclear until trials are conducted in humans, but the finding raises several interesting questions—notably whether scientists should publish their raw data for posterity and whether their time and funding would be better spent poring through old experiments than conducting new ones.
Read more at: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3052282/the-latest-medical-breakthrough-in-spinal-cord-injuries-was-made-by-a-computer-program
