Crowdsourcing Cures for Cancer
Millions of computer users all round the world are being invited to help speed up cures for cancer via an interactive website.
Cancer Research UK has created a mini website – ClicktoCure – so that people can help analyze data from its studies of the disease.
The charity’s researchers have been testing treatments on tumor samples which has generated colossal datasets. They consist of cell slides that show how tumor cells have reacted to treatments.
How to Participate
After signing up, users are taken to a tutorial that explains the cells to analyze and the ones to ignore. The project wants members of the crowd to identify any irregular-shaped cells and how they might have been affected by a yellow stain added during the research, and how bright that stain is.
To do this participants click on an additional image that closely resembles the sample they are viewing. This information is fed back to cancer researchers who look for correlations between cell types and treatment responses. According to the website, classifying samples is as easy as matching pairs of images and only takes a few clicks.
Accelerating Research
The hope is that research that would normally take years to complete can be condensed into a few months. In addition to accelerating the data analysis the crowd’s input could also free up scientists to work on more complicated aspects of their research.
As of today (20th November) 204,994 images have already been analyzed.
ClicktoCure was created in collaboration with Zooniverse – the site that involves people analyzing data from space.
Reader Comments
Nice post and nice website developed by Cancer Research UK. this is helpful to know more about cancer.
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Posted by dendritic cell cancer therapy on December 12, 2012
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