Grand Canyon, mid 80s
Man, wasn't she beautiful!
Tensors. You know
what they are, right? They are sort of
like vectors, only more so. Does that
help? Well, that’s about all I can say
about them. Tensors are used in
seismology and the study of rock stress in deforming rock bodies, so at one time
I knew a little about them, and even tormented advanced students with the
bloody thing! The tensors I cared about
appeared as a 3X3 matrix, and you could do all sorts of cute tricks with them. Now, forget it. I apologize to all those early grad students
for the unnecessary suffering I put them through.
Why tensors? Well,
some people from the University of Utah have developed a mathematical model,
using tensor analysis, to predict the outcome of various therapies on
OVCA. The input data is a scan of the
tumor genome, compared to the genome of a normal cell from the same
person. The mathematical model, given
this input, can tell a physician such things as how long her patient will live,
whether the tumor will respond to platinum-based drugs, etc., etc. Note that it just predicts the future; it
doesn’t in any way alter it. So, is it
useful? I guess so, but I wouldn’t want
to be in the white coat and cheap tie of the oncologist who has to tell a woman
that she has less than 18 months to live.
Maybe she’d rather not know.
So, math whizzes: How about an algorithm that will tell a
woman how not to get OVCA in the first place?
More on this subject. Easier, maybe
ReplyDeletehttp://scicasts.com/cancer-research/2056-oncogenomics/9261-new-mathematical-technique-increases-accuracy-of-ovarian-cancer-prognosis-and-diagnosis/