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Big Data, Big Help

Revolutionizing the medical field
What is Big Data? It was only this year that the Oxford English Dictionary put Big Data amongst all those other definitions and defined Big Data as, "data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its manipulation and management present significant logistical challenges." While the term "Big Data" is new, the idea is not. The Washington Post illustrates a centuries old use of big data when, Johannes Kepler used Tycho Brahes detailed astronomical dataset to elucidate certain laws of planetary motion. In the United States, Big Data collection has its roots in 1790 with the first U.S census, and it has continued amassing such information every ten years since. The Human Face of Big Data mentions that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover also created his own Big Data archive. He collected information in cabinets, using it to hold Big data could be worth $9 secrets and power over U.S presidents and public billion to U.S. public health figures. However, instances like J. Edgar Hoovers archives and the NSAs recent abuse of power service alone and $300 billion mining Internet traffic do not delineate the great achievements here and yet to come in the field. Big to American health care in Data has influenced marketing, natural disaster general. cleanup, and the medical field, which, in particular, has had many breakthroughs. According to McKinsey & Company big data could be worth $9 -McKinsey & Company billion to U.S. public health service alone and $300 billion to American health care in general. The Big Data in the medical field is everything from hundreds of sequenced genomes and heart disease to the spread of viruses and sexual networks. Where does Big Data come from? Medical research has amassed and amassed Big Data, especially since coding the human genome, completed in 2003 for more than a billion dollars. Now that human genome sequencing is much cheaper, more The Human Face of Big Data gives human genomes have been mapped and this has a wonderful overview of the many accumulated in Big Data. How Big is the Human different facets of Big Data. Genome gives a visual to the quantity of the human genome: "If the DNA sequence of the human genome were compiled in books, the equivalent of 200 volumes the size of a Manhattan telephone book (at 1000 pages each) would be needed to hold it all. Electronic medical records are also an example of Big Data. Initially, hospitals took records on reams and reams of papers, stored in filing cabinets and basements. The enormous paper trail of every patient was hard to follow in order to find correlations and patterns in the information. However, The Human Face of Big Data emphasizes that

with the advent of electronic databases to help organize and share information about patients, the information can be readily analyzed. Furthermore, Big Data is also collected via high-resolution medical imagers and monitoring equipment, like electronic fetal monitor (EFM). Previously, especially with the EFM, paper records were kept, but no one had to time to process or utilize them since the data sets were so long, normally only about a page or so (about an hour of recording time) was kept. However, now all that data can be stored and scrutinized. A number of these Big Data collections have already led to breakthroughs. What is Big Data doing? When premature babies are born, modern intensive care units track a premature infants heartbeat, chest motion, breathing rate, heart rate, blood oxygen level, and blood presume many times, sometimes hundreds of times, per second. Yet, The Human Face of Big Data reflects that even though all that data was being taken, nurses write one number, on a paper chart, every hour, which is in no way conducive to pattern recognition. Carolyn McGregor from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology noticed all this information going to waste and worked with IBM to collect and inspect all this information. During her efforts a pattern was found, one that can save lives: a healthy persons heartbeat is not regular. Furthermore the analysis showed that when the an infection begins, the heartbeat becomes more uniform. By utilizing the heartbeat monitor to a potential that nurses previously did not do, a babys infection can be recognized up to 24-hours before symptoms appear. The Human Face of Big Data does not mitigate the impact this could have writing that it enables babies to begin receiving lifesaving treatments for their infections before its too late. The same, low and gaping collection of babys vitals was also done for patients with heart disease. The Framingham Heart Study is a sixty-year-old study funded by the government that gathers information from a number of participants. Sixty years amounts to a lot of data, but it is not as useful data as it could Above photo by Jason Grows as seen in The Human be. Participants only receive a checkup once every Face of Big Data: depicts only 10 hours of printed EKGs two years, which leaves gaps in body and behavioral changes. Arielle Brown discusses one of the limitations of the study and how it "opened some questions about correlations, like why there are people with no apparent risk factors who suffer heart attacks, while some who do all the wrongs things for their health go on to live long lives." Currently, Heath eHeart is working to figure out that mystery along with many other heart disease questions through a massive study. Their websites states that they will use all the information to "develop strategies to prevent and treat all aspects of heart disease." Heath eHeart will also look to see whether different kinds of genes are an Health eHeart is looking for more participants! Go to http://www.health-eheartstudy.org/ indicator of different heart disease risks, accessing one of to find out more. the major Big Data archives, human genomes.

The Clinical Decision Making group within CSAIL works to connect and then test hypothesizes on genomic data. Elena Grant says that researchers at Harvard School of Public Health are doing the same in order to, ferret out clues to infections, cancer, and noncommunicable diseases. In fact, all this research of the genome, because of Big Data, has led to a new field that looks at genetics to personalize medicine based on the patients genome. David Becker explains personalized medicine as providing targeted preventive care and therapeutic treatment based on an individual's genetic makeup. While there has not been a major shift from blockbuster medicines yet, it is beginning to happen. This study of pharmacology and genomics is called pharmacogenomics. In an abstract from the Clinical Colorectal Cancer, applications were shown for this new field in cancer. Pharmacogenomic tests were used on cancer patients to predict which cancer treats they would respond least the bestleast adverselytoo. The FDA has approved over 120 drugs with pharmacogenomic biomarkers. About these drugs the FDA states that, Pharmacogenomics can play an important role in identifying responders and nonresponders to medications, avoiding adverse events, and optimizing drug dose. However, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins states that thousands of lifesaving drugs are sitting pharmacology + genomics = unused on drug companies shelves. The Human pharmacogenomics Face of Big Data furthers Collins statement by mentioning that the difference between curing a It wouldnt be possible without Big Data. disease and triggering a fatal reaction can be as small as a few genes hiding among 20,000 or so in a persons DNA. [] With the cost of genetic sequencing plummeting, its now possible to determine which patients will be harmedand which can be curedby a specific drug. This personalized medicine is coming into the consumers lives, because Big Data has given researches the ability to analyze information in ways that were not possible before. The same above book also talks about the personalized drug Kalydeco, which helps cystic fibrosis users with the rare mutation G551D. Only four percent of those with cystic fibrosis have the mutation, but the drug is perfect for Lauren Brenneman and her son who both have this genetic anomaly. This drug developed by Vertex, which screened 2.7 million chemical compounds and 600,000 cystic fibrosis compounds, is the first-ever drug to correct an underling cause of cystic fibrosis. Improving Medical Community The shift in the medical field by Big Data is not only in the ability to recognize and target diseases, but also to improve hospitals. A recent step was taken by Dr. Jeffrey Brenner of Camden, New Jersey, who was upset with the predicted value that 34 percent of the United States GDP will be spent on health care in 2040. With 600,000 records worth of hospital visits, he found that only about 1,000 people in the hospital he researched accounted for 30 percent of hospital bills. Dr. Brenner continues to use the power of data with his Camden Coalition of Healthcase Providers, which helps to mitigate this dysfunction in the health care system. The Human Face of Big Data remarks on the success story of Lillian Perez in this program. She accumulated $742,265 in hospitals bills throughout one year. However, since she has received home visits through the intervention of Dr. Brenners company, she has not gone to the ER once. The intervention sessions are simply a checkup to encourage and to make sure Lillian is taking her medicine, a venture much less costly than her previous ER visits. This group is only ten years old, but continues to utilize Big Data to target patients who exploit the ER and other health care benefits from hospitals. The medical community is also able to track epidemics to a degree never possible because of Big Data. FluView, created and maintained by the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), tracks flu strains as they

spread over the country. There is a massive collection of labs, hospitals and doctors who add to the Big Data on the flu epidemic. Lynetter Brammer at the CDC explains how the data works to fight outbreaks of the flu, "we learn where the flu is and in what relative proportion, what age groups are getting flu. [] We do anti-viral resistance testing to make sure the strains are still sensitive to the drugs for flu and we do genetic sequencing." The Human Face of Big Data refers to an attempt in northern Nigeria to eradicate polio there. Using satellite imaging to find villages that are not named even on GoogleMaps, a task force including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the Environmental Systems Research Institute, and the global telecommunications service provider Etisalat can administer vaccines to affected areas and then mark vaccinated areas on maps, tracking all progress made and yet to be made. When will the revolution stop? Many different parts of the medical field have been helped and also transformed because of Big Data, and the effects of Big Data are far from complete. Every day, new breakthroughs and applications of Big Data to the medical field are written about and shared. The medical field has come a long way since heartbeats were recorded once every hour and human genome sequencing was a billion dollar project that took ten years. An article on Pingdom Amazing facts and figures about the evolution of hard disk drives helps to explain why the Big Data revolution became possible only recently. Today, a terabyte of storage can fit in the palm of the hand for less than $100; less than fifty years ago 5MB needed 50 24-inch disks in a cabinet sized case which was leased for $3,200 a month. From reams of paper that no one looked at twice, to recognizing patterns that can save premature infants lives and medicine tailored to the individual, the medical field will continue to be transformed with Big Data.

IBM Model 350 Disk File with 5MB of storage in 1956. Credit: RAMAC 350 Restoration Site

For more information: The Human Face of Big Data by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt thehumanfaceofbigdata.com/ The FluView at http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/ Harvards School of Public Healths The promise of big data www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/spr12-big-data-tb-health-costs/ MITs Technology Reviews A Hospital Takes Its Own Big-Data Medicine www.technologyreview.com/news/518916/a-hospital-takes-its-own-big-data-medicine/ Googling the people mentioned in this article; they are all doing their own, unbelievable part in the medical revolution.

Megan Krause is currently creating a Big Data collection of Big Data articles.

Please email Megan with comments or questions at mzk5401@psu.edu