Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Definiens Defines Tips for Bringing Data Mining to Medical Imaging 

Definiens, a German healthcare company specializing in personalized medicine, has released tips for bringing data mining together with image analysis to fine tune patient treatment.

The company is known for its software for both data mining and the imaging tools used on stained tissue slides. By combining the tool, it hopes that doctors will be able to organize patients suffering from a single condition into subgroups and offer each one a more customized treatment plan.

Whether a doctor is in a research lab or a private practice, Definiens CEO Thomas Heydler believes that fitting cell-by-cell analysis of tissue samples back into the larger picture that additional genomic data can help to paint a clearer picture of what happens when our genes interact with our environment.

“While genomic data is highly valuable, it will be the correlation of genomics and tissue phenomics with patient outcomes that brings a level of accuracy to diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy that can’t be met with genomic data alone,” Heydler says.

To make this happen, the first step that Definiens recommends is to include data mining throughout research and clinical activities whenever image analysis occurs, particularly when diagnostic tools are able to gather data on more than one aspect of a patient’s medical condition. Not only would this put more information in the hands of physicians, but seamless integration also allows testing to be easily repeated down the road.

Definiens’ second tip to effectively combine data mining with tissue imaging is to quickly review image analysis results for quality and discard outliers, which in turn leads to more accurate statistical findings down the road.

After results are standardized, Definiens suggests correlating the image analysis results with outside data sources such as genomic data and patient outcomes to better personalize treatment plans. Researchers can then broaden their focus to find patterns throughout the research sample that explain the relationships between patients’ genetics and its link to certain diseases.

Finally, the company brings their tips back to verifying discoveries so the rest of the medical community can benefit from the findings as well, which is possible only after a study goes through numerous repetitions.

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