Mining DNA data in an efficient 2D optical architecture

摘要

Optical computing is applicable to very large database problems that require several iterations of processing. One such forthcoming problem is the analysis of DNA data, in which an individual in a population may have billions of bases intheir DNA structure. Current methods only find simple first order associations between the DNA structure and the expressed illnesses. This means that the presence or absence of a gene strongly influences the onset of an illness. These current methods will have a difficult time in finding higher order associations between the genome and the exprressed phenotypes. The discovery of such associations will take several iterations though a large database to extract association information. Searching a database of billions of elements for each of hundreds of individuals through thousands of iterations is prohibilively expensive on electronic computers. Highly parallel architectures asuch as optical correlators will offer the opportunity to process this large amount of data in a higher-order fashion.