An algorithm for genetic disease

As a biomedical informatics researcher, Nigam Shah spends his days using math to try to make sense of giant, unwieldy data sets. He’s used data mining to identify off-label drug use and to create widgets to add to electronic health records that may help doctors learn about best practices for the treatment of a disease in the absence of a randomized controlled trial. In one of his current projects, he’s using machine learning, a field of study that has helped develop self-driving cars and speech recognition software, to try to identify people with an under-diagnosed and potentially deadly genetic disorder.

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