An amazing new software program developed by Gil Alterovitz, PhD, a research fellow in the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, that turns gene and protein expression data into music, could help doctors hear whether their patients’ health has taken a turn for the worse.
WBUR recently did a story on the new software. “We felt that music, in some sense, can serve as a translator,” Alterovitz said in the piece. “There’s more and more information presented, so…we need a way to present it to the brain…in a way that it can handle it.”
We recently did a story on Alterovitz’s work in Vector, our research magazine, and Technology Review did a cool audio/video presentation that compared the sounds of sickness to the sounds of health.
After her daughter was born with a non-cancerous tumor obstructing her left eye, Katie Lane spent an afternoon lurching around her Waltham home, her hand blocking one eye, imagining life with monocular vision. With 20/20 eyesight, neither she nor her husband, Dan, even owned reading glasses. Now they were faced with the possibility that their daughter would be partially blind.
Riley arrived on July 6, 2007, via c-section at a hefty 9 pounds and 10 ounces. She was gorgeous, plump and hairy. The doctors mentioned she had a heart murmur, but probably nothing we needed to worry about.
