By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff
Harvard scientists are building a powerful computer system that will use artificial intelligence to scan the private medical files of 2.5 million people at local hospitals, as part of a government-funded effort to find the genetic roots of asthma and other diseases.
The $20 million project -- which would probe more deeply and more quickly into medical records than human researchers are capable of -- is designed to find links between patients' DNA and illnesses. Although the effort could raise concerns about privacy, researchers say the new program, called 'I2B2' (for 'Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) would respect the strict guidelines set out in federal and state laws, and could be a powerful tool for many kinds of research.
Hospitals gather huge amounts of information from patients each day -- from blood tests to chest X-rays and brain scans. For decades, researchers have pored through these records and gleaned insights that have helped millions of Americans. Now, the Harvard team hopes to put far more information at the fingertips of researchers, and to speed the process with sophisticated automation.
Scientists said the Harvard work and similar efforts elsewhere increase the stakes in the nation's move to medical records stored electronically.
With mounting examples of personal financial information being compromised, work such as this will have to be done with extreme care. Scientists also said, however, that if the project is successful, it would be widely copied -- and it could mean that studies that now take months or years could be done in weeks or even minutes.
"If we could use routine clinical care to generate new findings without having to do multimillion-dollar studies, that would be a true change in the way medical discovery is done," said Dr. Isaac Kohane, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who is one of the project's directors. "We want to use the healthcare system as a living laboratory."
All of the records -- from patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and several Partners HealthCare hospitals -- are protected by multiple layers of security designed to prevent private medical information from being released, the scientists said. None of the information will be sold, said John Glaser, the project's other director, and the chief information officer for Partners HealthCare.
Funding for the five-year I2B2 project began in the fall of 2004; researchers are now getting the first hints of success and are forming plans to contact patients.
The first study to be carried out under the project is an effort to understand the genetic roots of asthma, which afflicts about 20 million Americans. For reasons that are not well understood, some asthma patients do not respond well to the usual treatments and suffer repeated, frightening attacks that send them to the emergency room, said Dr. Scott Weiss, a scientist at the Channing Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital who is leading the asthma team.