DRASTIK Measures
Professor uses computer science for diabetes prevention.
Imagine visiting your doctor and receiving an instant — and accurate — assessment of your risk of developing type 2 diabetes, along with prevention recommendations based on your personal health history, family history, region, diet, exercise habits, occupation, and a host of other factors. Then imagine checking on your progress from your home computer. Alma Barranco-Mendoza, Ph.D., executive director of information technology and associate professor of computing science and biotechnology, plans to make this advanced level of diabetes prevention a reality with DRASTIK, or Diabetes Risk Assessment Temporal Intelligent Knowledgebase.
At the core of DRASTIK, is an algorithm that pulls together factors from a variety of disciplines. “When you take into consideration a wide variety of factors, you get a more complete and reliable diabetes risk assessment,” says Barranco-Mendoza. “My algorithm can analyze incomplete information and then improve its accuracy as more details are entered. This is rare in risk assessment.”
Barranco-Mendoza wanted DRASTIK to instantly provide meaningful information to physicians and patients. By merging linguistic analysis with probability analysis, she successfully developed a system that uses English as its sole medium of information. “When computers and people speak the same language, the result is a more user-friendly system,” she says, “and the easier DRASTIK is to use, the bigger the impact it can have on people’s lives.”
In 2008, she began collaborating with Kendall Ho, MD, associate dean of medicine and director of continuing medical education at UBC, who is developing clinical practice guidelines that physicians can access with a PDA. Combining Ho’s work with Barranco-Mendoza’s risk assessment system will give patients and physicians instant access to personalized assessment and prevention information.
The success of DRASTIK and the positive effect it could have on people’s lives is the result of more than 10 years of risk assessment research. “The ironic thing,” says Barranco-Mendoza, “is that I only took my first university computer science class as a filler because I thought it would be easy. Apparently, God had a very different plan for my life than I did.”
by Caleb Zimmerman
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