Carnegie Mellon leads NSF initiative to develop modeling tools for disease and compl...(ied approximation of a system that prese...),Health

In this new project, the researchers plan to take advantage of the strengths of both methods by tightly integrating the two into what they call MCAI 2.0.

One of the challenge problems driving this development involves modeling of pancreatic cancer, the fourth-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States and Europe. Computer modeling is particularly important for discovering how this cancer develops and how it might be detected at an early, treatable stage because researchers have had trouble developing an animal model. Christopher Langmead, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, and James Faeder, a computational biologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, will lead this effort, working with researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute.

"The death last year of our computer science colleague Randy Pausch, who had pancreatic cancer, made all of us at Carnegie Mellon appreciate the importance of improved models for this disease," Clarke said.

Atrial fibrillation, the most common form of heart rhythm disturbance, contributes to congestive heart disease and is responsible for 15 to 20 percent of strokes. Its incidence increases with age, so the aging demographics of America mean that this condition afflicting 2 to 3 million people today could be a problem for 10 million by 2050. A team led by Flavio Fenton, a biomedical researcher at Cornell University, and Radu Grosu, a computer scientist at SUNY at Stony Brook, will explore how modeling can enable physicians to predict the onset of atrial fibrillation.

A growing number of embedded systems are being integrated into cars electronic stability control
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