Medical Search Solved Again
December 10, 2015
I have looked at a wide range of medical information search systems over the years. These range from Medline to the Grateful Med.
I read “A Cure for Medical Researchers’ Big Data Headache.” The Big Data in question is the Medline database. The new search tool is ORiGAMI (I love that wonky upper and lower case thing).
The basic approach involves:
Apollo, a Cray Urika graph computer, possesses massive multithreaded processors and 2 terabytes of shared memory, attributes that allow it to host the entire MEDLINE database and compute multiple pathways on multiple graphs simultaneously. Combined with Helios, CADES’ Cray Urika extreme analytics platform, Sukumar’s team had the cutting-edge hardware needed to process large datasets quickly—about 1,000 times faster than a workstation—and at scale.
And the payoff?
Once the MEDLINE database was brought into the CADES environment, [Sreenivas Rangan Sukumar’s [a data scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory] team applied advanced graph theory models that implement semantic, statistical, and logical reasoning algorithms to create ORiGAMI. The result is a free online application capable of delivering health insights in less than a second based on the combined knowledge of a worldwide medical community.
My view is that Medline is not particularly big. The analysis of the content pool can generate lots of outputs.
From my vantage point in rural Kentucky, this is another government effort to create a search system. Perhaps this is the breakthrough that will surpass IBM Watson’s medical content capabilities?
Does your local health care provider have access to a Cray computer and the other bits and pieces, including a local version of Dr. Sukumar?
Stephen E Arnold, December 10, 2015
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