Word: databank
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...heart attacks painstakingly etched into silicon over nearly 30 years. Each spasm, each chemical released into the bloodstream by a dying heart muscle, each patient's treatment, is registered in this giant multivariate database by doctors, nurses and researchers at Duke University. The heart of the Medical Center's Databank for Cardiovascular Disease, these computers tell doctors, with greater certainty and accuracy every day, the best ways to treat not just heart attacks but a variety of other heart problems as well...
Like an economics student analyzing inflation, interest and unemployment rates and coming up with a forecast of which way the economy will go, the Duke databank, now a part of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, correlates important information about the body--enzyme levels, age, family history--into a prediction of how a given patient will respond to a certain type of treatment. Doctors on five continents dial into the system, type in the critical components of their patient's problem and get a recommendation for treatment based on the thousands of patients who have passed that way before...
Gene typing can be thought of as functioning inthe reverse way of physical fingerprinting, thatis, to eliminate what appear to be matches. Ingene typing, DNA samples isolated from tissues arecompared to information in a computer databank todetermine how rare a particular gene is in thegeneral population...
First, he argues, the current DNA databank istoo small, and second, it is unclear how muchattention should be paid to ethnicity whenmatching samples...
...Gene frequency differs from subpopulation tosubpopulation," says Hartl. "When you startcomparing with a databank containing DNA types ofall ethnic groups [put together], the matchfrequency seems smaller than it actually...