Real-Life Math
Mathematics and informatics are joined at the hip. Medical informaticians
and health information science professionals work with numbers every day,
no matter what position they hold.
"The discipline of math [logic]
is very important to the field of health informatics," says Denis J. Protti.
He is a professor at the school of health information science at the University
of Victoria.
"Mathematics is the base for statistics and epidemiology
-- both of which are becoming increasingly important when it comes to data
analysis in health care," he says.
Epidemiology is the branch of medicine
studying the control of epidemics, or outbreaks of diseases and illnesses
that spread quickly through a community. Numbers play a key role in figuring
out why some people get sick and others don't. Math can also be used to figure
out who gets better and why.
People in medical informatics use a range
of math, from simple math to complicated logarithms and logic problems.
For
example, they might be involved in research where they must determine things
like: if "x" patients get well under an old set of circumstances, and "x"
+ 10 per cent more patients get well under a new set of circumstances, but
the ones who don't get well don't get dramatically sicker either, how do you
figure out when to use the old treatment and when to take a chance on the
new one?
Another area is probabilities: if a person who carries a gene
for a disease that's expressed in 1 child out of 4 marries another person
carrying the same gene, what is the probability that their first child will
have the disease? The second child? And so on.
Or you may be a manager
trying to reduce skyrocketing health-care costs. You may have to calculate
the cost-effectiveness of various programs to help you make the right decision.
You're
a medical informatics graduate and your specialty is exploiting
database and knowledge-based techniques for developing biomedical information
systems. You're constantly dealing with complicated logarithms and mathematical
equations.
One of the simpler mathematical tasks you sometimes have
to solve is figuring out how long it will take a data transmission to be completed.
You have access to several medical databases worldwide.
You have a
12-megabyte file to download and you have 2 lines over which you can download
the file -- an Ethernet connection at 10 Mbps and a modem line at 56 Kbps.
Figuring that it takes 8 bits to make a byte, how long will it take the 2
lines to deliver the file? Which line is faster and by how much?
Megabyte
(MB) = 1,048,576 bytes
Megabit (Mb) = 1,048,576 bits
Kilobit
= 1,024 bits
byte = 8 bits
Mbps = megabits per second
Kbps
= kilobits per second