Dr. Rachel Karchin, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Institute for Computational Medicine, is scheduled to speak at APGA 2013. The meeting entitled “Automated Personal Genome Analysis for Clinical Advisors: Challenges and Solutions” will be held at the Hillman Center for Future-Generation Technologies in the School of Computer Science Complex at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, PA.

The future of personalized medicine is often envisaged as doctors interrogating a “Dr. in a Box” that integrates multiple streams of data – whole patient genomes, blood tests, scans, and other information – to detect anomalies, diagnose disease, monitor response to therapy, and track changes in health over time. Of particular importance will be the ability to predict disease risk and treatment responsiveness from personal genome information. Developing machine learning software to model the relationships between complex diseases and genome variation is a major challenge.