BLACKSBURG, Va., Sept. 19 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists are using a supercomputer to test a search program that can report connections between discoveries reported in biomedical articles.
The Virginia Tech University researchers are using System X, the university's supercomputer, to test the program that searches articles on the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed database.
The researchers created a search capability called "Storytelling" that finds connections between apparently dissimilar information.
"The stories are pieced together by analyzing large volumes of text or other data" said Naren Ramakrishnan, associate professor of computer science who helped the create software. He said the aim is to help scientists make connections in the complex, burgeoning world of scientific discovery.
"Our minds cannot correlate all available datasets efficiently and with any high degree of confidence without the aid of computational biology," said Richard Helm, associate professor of biochemistry. "Attempting to find significant correlations within the ocean of online datasets is daunting."
The research was described in the August issue of the Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM SIGKDD (the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge, Discovery, and Data Mining).
