Doctors to Get Better Access to Digital Data

Nov. 9, 2015

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $1.3 million grant to researchers at the University of Arizona to develop open-source software that will enable health care professionals and scientists to manage biomedical big data in digital form.

The advanced data compression software for the first time puts digitized biomedical data in a format and size that doctors, pathologists and other health care workers with limited resources and in remote locations will be able to access, analyze and store. Usable digitized data means quicker second opinions and diagnoses for patients.

"Advances in image compression technology for biomedical big data are essential to advance biomedical diagnostics and research and to save more lives," said Ali Bilgin, UA assistant professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering and principal investigator of the project. "We are in the middle of a global transition to digitization of biomedical data, and there’s a lot of it out there — but in files too large to be transmitted, stored or retrieved."