Event by the The Circle of Hellenic Academics in Boston:

In this talk we present an analytics approach to a) personalized diabetes management and b) design of clinical trials for cancer as well as some thoughts on the direction of the field of analytics relative to medicine but also more generally.

In the first part of the talk, we present a system to make personalized lifestyle and health decisions for diabetes management, as well as for general health and diet management. In particular, we address the following components of the system: (a) efficiently learning preferences through a dynamic questionnaire that accounts for human behavior; (b) modeling blood glucose behavior and updating these models to match individual measurements; and (c) using the learned preferences and blood glucose models to generate an overall diet and exercise plan using mixed-integer robust optimization. We have implemented our system as an online application, which we demonstrate.

In the second part of the talk, we propose an analytics approach for the analysis and design of clinical trials that provides insights into what is the best currently available drug combination to treat a particular form of cancer and how to design new clinical trials that can discover improved drug combinations. We develop semi-automated extraction techniques to build a comprehensive database of data from clinical trials. We use this database to develop statistical models from earlier trials that are capable of predicting the survival and toxicity of the combination of the drugs used, when the drugs used have been seen in earlier trials, but in different combinations. Then, using these statistical models, we develop optimization models that select novel treatment regimens that could be tested in clinical trials, based on the totality of data available on existing combinations. We also present concrete models for gastric and breast cancer, two of the leading causes of cancer death worldwide. Ultimately, our approach offers promise for improving life expectancy and quality of life for cancer patients at low cost.