Help the fight against cancer
I have previously written about Community Grid, the gigantic network of
computers that crunches numbers day and night to help fight cancer. What makes
the grid so powerful is the fact that anyone can add their home / office
computer to the grid. When the computer is idle, the computer will request work
from the grid servers and help with the data processing.
Every day the grid process so much data
that one computer on its own would have taken many thousands of years to
process.
Following in the footsteps of the Community
Grid, charity organization Cancer Research UK has also turned to the internet for help.
Clinical trials for breast cancer research
have produced tons of valuable data. Only problem is, there are simply too much
data for the scientist to analyze!
At this point you might wonder – “I don’t even have a white lab coat! How can
I possibly help?!”
It is not very complicated and anybody can
help the scientists analyze their data! The data consists of millions of images
of tumors. Each image may or may not contain cancer cells. If the image does,
all you have to do is guess plus or minus the number of cells that have been
stained yellow and then give an estimate on their brightness. You don’t have to
be spot on; ball park figure is all they are looking for.
They yellow that you see is the level of
the oestrogen receptor protein present in the cell. This will give scientist an
idea of how well a certain patient responded to their cancer treatment. This in
turn will help doctors to give personalized treatments to patients.
With nearly a million images analyzed, the
project is a big success but there is still terabytes worth of data to be
analyzed. So jump in and go and
analyze some images to help make the world a better place!
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