The Cloud and Big Data Will Revolutionize Medical Diagnostics

The cloud and big data will revolutionize medical diagnostics

Position paper Hugo Sequeira (10516611) April 2013 Keywords: Cloud computing, Storage, EHR, Knowledge, Cloud Storage, Hadoop, MapReduce, High-performance, Computing, Distributed systems

Abstract

Big data and clouds are changing the world we know. But too much data and information can raise unawareness if these data aren’t transformed into knowledge. The Electronic Health record was implemented some years ago with the purpose of storing information of patients. There are millions of EHR worldwide, but no analyses its been done with them. It’s currently estimate that the amount of medical research information doubles every five years, and physicians practicing in the rapidly changing field of oncology are faced with the challenge to remain current with the latest medical literature, research, guidelines and best practices. The result of this waste of knowledge: one in five diagnoses are incorrect or incomplete and nearly 1.5 million medication errors are made every year. This paper argues that cloud-like systems and computing along with other technologies, will be the future of this medicine, increasing the application of this knowledge and increasing the effectiveness in medical diagnostic.

I. Introduction

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. So much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, cell phone GPS signals, and medical information to name a few. We call this “big data”. As a quick review, big data is a collection of data sets that are so big that it is hard to collect, analyse, visualize, and process using regular software and systems. It spans in four different dimensions: Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity. Organizations are awash with ever-growing data of all...