Posts are written by library staff and reflect their personal opinions not necessarily those of MSK.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin has made advances in computing to assist researchers with discovering more effective chemotherapy drugs. TACC employs three projects for carrying out this process with their supercomputers: virtual screening, molecular modeling, and evolutionary analyses.
A new article published in this month’s Annual Reviews delves into the issue that many published medical findings may actually be false. This concern has been written about before, notably in PLoS in 2005, but the authors here attempt to describe the issues with data analysis practices and “point to tools and behaviors that can be implemented to reduce the problems with published scientific results.”
The authors, Jeffrey T. Leek and Leah R. Jager of Johns Hopkins, begin by defining false discoveries in medical research. They describe how scientific publishing was created before the age of modern computing, statistics, data analysis software and the Internet. The overabundance of data, compounded by the pressure to produce positive results by groups like funding agencies, has created a cloud of suspicion over published research. They believe that it “is possible to confuse correlation with causation, a predictive model may overfit the training data, a study may be underpowered, and results may be overinterpreted or misinterpreted by the scientific press.”
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Dr. Dhruv Khullar of the Massachusetts General Hospital writes in the New York Times this week about the surprisingly bad design flaws that plague hospitals and in turn, their patients. Dr. Khullar cites various studies that detail how around 30% of intensive care patients acquire infections originating in hospitals and how housing patients in private rooms can reduce the risk of both airborne and surface contact infections. You’d might think that private rooms will greatly increase construction costs, but it’s possible that the price of “single-occupancy rooms is more than offset by the money saved because of fewer infections.”
