Big data, better health

摘要

Take a moment to think about the data associated with your health. Over the years, you've probably had X-rays and scans of various kinds, including perhaps an ultrasound or two. Then there are blood tests, body weight and height measurements... The list is long. This already amounts to a large amount of information about your body and your state of health. But it will soon be dwarfed by the data generated by genetic tests, chemical tests and other blood-marker tests, in addition to the advanced scans and activity trackers that are becoming available. It is easy to imagine that adding this wealth of information to your electronic patient record will lead to some kind of medical nirvana in which doctors run a predictive analytics algorithm over your "big data" to forecast your future health issues.