Big data analytics: A game-changer in cancer treatment and the healthcare industry
Cancer is one of the fastest evolving, ever-changing intricate diseases. It is the second leading cause of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 14 million new cases of cancer are reported each year.
And is expected to rise by about 70% over the next 20 years. The fight against cancer has made a huge pace over the past 30 years, with the survival rate doubled, a general cure in the field remains subtle.
Now the question is — How Oncologists can alleviate these challenges? That’s where big data comes into the picture. According to research, the Big Data market size is set to grow to a whopping $6.6 billion by 2021. As it continues to evolve, it can expand traditional healthcare by detecting trends to improve disease diagnosis.
In fact, in some parts of the world, it is already being used to classify diseases, such as cancer, more accurately, and in their early stages.
Big data is empowered with strong abilities and it is most appropriate for handling a huge volume of data. The role of big data in medicine is to — fabricate better health profiles and enhanced predictive models around individual patients to diagnose better and treat diseases.
For instance — IBM Watson Health has solved some of the pressing challenges with the help of Big data. By combining human experts with augmented intelligence, it helps health researchers and professionals across the world translate data and knowledge into insights to make more informed decisions.
Significance of Big Data in Fighting Cancer
Researchers are predicting that Big Data analysis has the potential to accelerate cancer treatment and to make good on the promise of more personalized medicine and treatment.
Data is being used to help oncologists in giving tailor-made treatments based on — patient history, biopsy specimens, and other related data.
Institutions across the world are busy collating countless forms of cancer-related data from patient case histories, global research, and surveys.
A tremendous quantity of data is now being analyzed and examined to spot findings that can be used to create new therapies leading to more personalized treatments.
For instance, researchers in the United States are now sifting through hundreds of gigabytes of image data from thousands of patients to try to find differences that distinguish the different subtypes of breast cancers from each other. Given that no cancer is the same, this could be the holy grail of cancer treatment.
Presently, researchers are using risk stratification modules to creep through millions of health records in a population to understand patterns, trends and patient similarity metrics leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems.
This also takes into context unstructured data such as — physician notes and discharge documents that are not often taken into account for analysis, reinforcing the importance of Big Data analytics in this area of treatment.
Big Data also assists researchers and practitioners with specific details of how thousands of medicines interact with the human body, making suggestions of those that might interact with cancer-infested cells.
Interestingly it was recently announced that 14 cancer institutes across the United States and Canada would be using analytics and AI to match cancer patients with the treatments most likely to help them.
In addition to recommending relevant drugs to treat particular cancer, Artificial Intelligence could also suggest therapies not tried before.
Big Data is also utilized to predict which patients are most likely to follow their doctor’s advice and which aren’t to help prevent hospital readmissions in the most vulnerable patients. Apps are being developed that can track when a patient takes his or her medication.
Others record information like — calls, texts, physical location, movement and sleep patterns that can help alert doctors or family members if the patient is likely feeling unwell.
Big Data has the potential to improve patient outcomes, understand the disease and help cure cancer with these advances in the quantity and quality of the data which is collated with the computing power to analyze and understand the disease.
Big Data Healthcare Analytics Market Analysis
Big data in the healthcare sector is transforming the manner in which doctors and patients handle care. It has an extensive range of applications including elucidation of advantages of therapy, better sample selection in clinical trials, advanced forecasting of disease patterns, differentiating pricing strategies, and more.
Numerous factors are propelling the healthcare big data analytics market growth. Some of these factors include growth in regulatory compliances in the healthcare sector, rising demand for data analytics for population health management, constant growth in a huge amount of medical data generation in the likes of sensors data, rising expenditure by healthcare providers on technologically advanced solutions, biometric data, and electronic health record.
Additional factors pushing market growth include rising government initiatives, the emergence of various technological advancements including wearables, IoT, mHealth, and initiatives undertaken by the government such as releases of data from the CDC and FDA.
Conclusion
Today, with the use of big data, medical analysis to predict cancer recurrence, progression and response to therapy is no longer a tough task. The fight continues but leveraging Big Data analytics can help speed up the process of finding the elusive cure, thereby ensuring that there is a definitive light at the end of the tunnel.
