Researchers to apply maths to improve healthcare

Imperial researchers have been given a funding boost to convert healthcare data into useful tools for doctors, using mathematics. The EPSRC Centre for Mathematics of Precision Healthcare will bring together mathematicians with researchers in computing, engineering and medicine. Funded with a £2 million grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council , the researchers will take data from the healthcare sector and turn it into information and tools that are useful to inform clinical decisions and public health campaigns to improve the overall health of people in the UK. A long-term aim is to have a health system where clinical interventions and improvements in national public health strategy are intrinsically linked to the benefit of patients. Professor Mauricio Barahona from the Department of Mathematics , who will lead the Centre, said: "We are essentially trying to bring new mathematical tools to tame data sets of relevance in healthcare. Although there is a huge amount of data out there, and an increasing array of computational methods, there is a need to bring new mathematical ideas to the analysis of such problems." Using network-based methods, the mathematicians in the centre will aim to transform data into something that is intelligible and useful for colleagues working in medicine and public health. The hope is that doctors will be able to use information about individual patients combined with population level data, including lifestyle and socioeconomic factors, to produce patient outcomes based on better decision making.