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Sounding out disease

"That tumor sounds worse." That's what doctors could be saying in the future if a recently developed computer program, which turns gene and protein expression data into music, takes off.

Developer Gil Alterovitz, PhD, a research fellow in the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP), drew inspiration from watching anesthesiologists in the operating room try to simultaneously monitor up to 20 different, real-time patient variables—heart rate and blood pressure, for instance. Sounding an alarm for any single change in a variable seemed a poor solution, especially since many variables are interdependent and change together (indeed, anesthesiologists often begin tuning out the alarms). "The solution is to put everything into a holistic picture and ask, 'Is the patient's state going well or not?'" says Alterovitz.

His first step was to reduce redundancy by compressing correlated variables into a few important combinations, or groups. He then set each combination to music, so important changes in a patient's vital signs could be easily picked up by ear. "We define 'well' as harmonious chord intervals," Alterovitz explains. "In disease, the notes clash together and sound inharmonious."

He has also adapted this approach to studying changes in gene activity associated with disease. In a case study on colon cancer, he compressed data from 3,142 different genes into four combinations and assigned a note to each, played as chords. When inflammation occurred in the cancer, the chords sounded distinctly atonal, even hauntingly eerie.

"Listening is a quick way to gauge a patient's state, and doesn't interfere with visual attention," he says. "For each disease and population group, you can tune the program so there's good separation between normal and abnormal."

Health care organizations have yet to pick up on this technology, but Alterovitz's program has drawn interest from the U.S. Navy, air-traffic controllers and companies like Verizon, who are keen on simplifying their data analysis. "Music is innate," says Alterovitz. "You don't have to learn anything in order to use it."