Researchers Use Google's Search Algorithms To Fight Cancer 52
MatthewVD writes "German scientists have modified Google's PageRank algorithm to scan tumors and learn more about how cancers progress. PageRank orders results based on how other web pages are connected to them via hyperlinks; the modified algorithm, NetRank, scans how genes and proteins in a cell are similarly connected through a network of interactions with their neighbors. This approach could also yield new therapies to help combat tumors."
Re:Oh Geez (Score:5, Funny)
Serious question: will their be an AdSense-style scheme for recurring cancer-sufferers to accrue referral income?
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Google can steal all my cancer. I wouldn't mind one bit. I wouldn't even mind the ads, in that case. ;-)
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Gee, how did not anyone think about there being relation between different body parts when cancer spreads??
Well yeah, that's how science research works. The bloody obvious must be consensually established before it gets considered a valid work hypothesis or argument. And once a consensus takes hold on the wrong conclusion, it takes an impressive amount of contrarian data to shift opinions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiable#Kuhn_and_Lakatos [wikipedia.org]
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It has nothing to do with anatomical connection between body parts. That's a naive assumption. People have known that cancer spreads from the original tumor to a metastatic site via blood and lymph vessels for a long time. The article is about identifying correlations between changes in expression of genes and proteins, and how these are linked to cancer progression and metastasis. Believe it or not, but every cell in your body is a machine with millions, if not billions, of working parts. One small ch
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This is nothing more than some twisting to make it "nerdy" article. The original pagerank algorithm is just about relations between different pages. Gee, how did not anyone think about there being relation between different body parts when cancer spreads??
Amen. This is EXACLTY how every does it, and always has. Where do you think google got it's idea from?
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This is nothing more than some twisting to make it "nerdy" article.
You don't consider biochemists to be nerds? Not geeky maybe but definitely nerdy.
Markov? (Score:1)
This is just another markov model, just like PageRank. Move along people, nothing to see here.
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Which makes me wonder, on the all things that interest geeks, why do they ignore things like communication? Why is there no comprehensive research done towards generation human readable text by automation?
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Which makes me wonder, on the all things that interest geeks, why do they ignore things like communication? Why is there no comprehensive research done towards generation human readable text by automation?
Yourself make seem generation almost readable text by automation. Will you confirmation Turing test on the soon?
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Why is there no comprehensive research done towards generation human readable text by automation?
There is. It's just very difficult to generate useful text, moreso automatically. Markov chains give you good results (considering the little effort required) but the text is gibberish. I don't think there's a "killer application" for this, though. Find a way to kill people with it and sure enough we'll have it in a few years.
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Economics mostly. It's still cheaper to hire a bunch of people from China/India/Alabama or other third-world location. Generating text by automation seems to require a pretty strong AI, and that's hard to get.
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Google's? (Score:2)
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Doesn't matter. They have the patent. That's all that counts.
So, expect any future cancer cures to either be blocked from the market, or served with craploads of ads.
All fucking journos must fucking die (Score:5, Insightful)
Die. Just die in a fire. Die, die, die.
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Seriously, did you RTFA where the researcher himself described the algorithm as being based on PageRank
“We first experimented with our own ideas on network algorithms until we realized that what we needed existed already with the PageRank algorithm, so why reinvent the wheel?” Winter recalled.
“Our PageRank-based algorithm singles out proteins in the cancer cells that seem to either promote or suppress disease progression,” Winter said.
How about the abstract of the research paper in q
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If all they want is to find highly-connected nodes, then the Oracle of Bacon [oracleofbacon.org]-style average length solution would work just as well.
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Researchers: "[NetRank operates] in a manner similar to Google's PageRank"
Retard masquerading as a professional journalist: "Researchers modified PageRank to develop NetRank"
Die. Just die in a fire. Die, die, die.
Researchers' paper: "NetRank is based on Google's PageRank algorithm."
Read. Just read the article. Read, read, read.
Interesting idea, flawed paper (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea is interesting but the paper seems flawed. They integrate data and then look at how genes are positioned in the network with page-rank. The problem is that genes positioning in the network is highly dependent on how studied they are. Therefore, very well studied will get a high "NetRank." Genes known to be predictive of cancer progression are very well studied (lots of fudning in that area). This means the algorithm is basically finding and returning a list of what we already know, and it turns out that what we know is reasonably predictive when you combine 400+ markers.
I'm surprised this made it by peer review without additional experiments to assess the role that this bias plays.
Thigh bone's connected to the ... (Score:2)
PageRank is no search algorithm (Score:2)
look at the name, it says it all .. its a ranking algorithm.
Okay google I get (Score:2)
Colour me surprised if... (Score:3)
Spare CPU cycles for cancer? (Score:1)