Communications of the ACM
Computational Medicine Begins to Enhance the Way Doctors Detect and Treat Disease
"Computational medicine can help you see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together to give a more holistic picture," says Raimond Winslow, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Computational Medicine.
Credit: Will Kirk / HIPS
The Johns Hopkins University Institute of Computational Medicine is using powerful computers to analyze and mathematically model disease mechanisms. The technique enables researchers to offer a new perspective to medical diagnosis and treatment, says institute director Raimond Winslow.
"Computational medicine can help you see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together to give a more holistic picture," Winslow says. He says the computational models help to understand the complex interactions involved in disease mechanisms, aid in diagnosis, and test the effectiveness of different therapies. For example, advanced mathematical models enable researchers to better understand how networks of molecules are implicated in cancer.
Computational physiological medicine involves using computer models to examine how biological systems change over time from a healthy to an unhealthy state. Computational anatomy uses medical images to detect changes in the shape of various structures in the brain. "Computational medicine will continue to grow as a discipline because it is providing a new quantitative approach to understanding, detecting, and treating disease at the level of the individual," Winslow says.
From Johns Hopkins University
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