#barzilay

Hundreds Of Foreign Cyber-Attack Units Are Targeting US And Israel, Says Former IDF Intel Officer

All organizations and individuals around the world are facing growing risks of cyber attacks. This is a reflection of the fact that “for the first time in history, crime is being led by the smartest people in the world—smart and creative people,” a leading Israeli cyber-security expert has warned. Menny Barzilay, chief technology officer of the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at…

Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014. She soon learned that good data about the disease is hard to find. “You are desperate for information — for data,” she says now. “Should I use this drug or that? Is that treatment best? What are the odds of recurrence? Without reliable empirical evidence, your treatment choices become your own best guesses.”

Across different areas of cancer care — be it diagnosis, treatment, or prevention — the data protocol is similar. Doctors start the process by mapping patient information into structured data by hand, and then run basic statistical analyses to identify correlations. The approach is primitive compared with what is possible in computer science today, Barzilay says.

These kinds of delays and lapses (which are not limited to cancer treatment), can really hamper scientific advances, Barzilay says. For example, 1.7 million people are diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. every year, but only about 3 percent enroll in clinical trials, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Current research practice relies exclusively on data drawn from this tiny fraction of patients. “We need treatment insights from the other 97 percent receiving cancer care,” she says.

To be clear: Barzilay isn’t looking to up-end the way current clinical research is conducted. She just believes that doctors and biologists — and patients — could benefit if she and other data scientists lent them a helping hand. Innovation is needed and the tools are there to be used.