Medicine changes and the terms used to describe it change, drawing more and more from the vocabulary of technology and information technology. What does personalized medicine mean? And Real World Data? Within the “Roche Now, big data united for health” project, Ennio Tasciotti, scientist expert in medical biotechnologies, explains the meaning of the words increasingly used in the medical field. The campaign includes 5 digital talks (here the first https://video.repubblica.it/salute/dossier/labrevolution/cosa-sono-i-big-data/385533/386261), i.e. five in-depth videos, which will be published also on LabRevolution in the coming weeks. Here is the mini-glossary of this new video, to orient yourself in the world of big data.
The words of the new medicine
Big data: the set of all computer data, so vast in size, fast in generation and complex in nature, that it cannot be processed with traditional methods. The data relating to patients, their state of health, the type of disease and the therapies available are. By analyzing them it is possible to discover the links between very different phenomena, to find the correlations necessary to better understand the course of the disease based on the therapy used.
Artificial intelligence: the discipline of computer science that studies the theoretical bases and techniques that allow the design of systems (hardware) and programs (software) with performances ever closer to those of human intelligence. What can it do for patients? Thanks to machine learning technologies, it can recognize, for example, patterns or cause-and-effect relationships, and provide models for predicting the development of the disease and useful for choosing the most effective treatment.
Real world data: the set of patient health data obtainable from a series of sources attributable to daily clinical practice, such as electronic medical records, insurance claims, drug registers, wearable devices. These also include studies conducted on heterogeneous patient populations in real contexts (and not in clinical studies which, as a rule, include only patients with certain characteristics and parameters). Real world data therefore differ from data collected in an experimental context and refer, instead, to observational data measured in the field.
Real world evidence: clinical evidence based on data from patient populations outside clinical trials, ie in the “real world”. Thanks to real world evidence it is possible to collect information on the effect of drugs in the long term on a larger portion of the population and to understand which groups of patients are most appropriate for a certain treatment.
Personalized medicine: a new dimension of medicine based on the profile of each patient. Since each patient is different from the other, so too is the way his body reacts to the disease and the way the disease progresses over time. The way therapies work can also change. Thanks to the incredible advances in genetics, the understanding of its impact on the evolution of diseases and on the response to treatments are now much clearer and allow you to choose the most suitable therapeutic path, case by case.
The future of medicine is in big data. This is what the Italian system needs
by Tiziana Moriconi
