2013 INFORMS Annual Meeting Minneapolis
Plenaries and Keynotes
Presented by Dimitris Bertsimas, Operations Research Center, MIT
In this talk Bertsimas presents an analytics approach to personalized diabetes management and the design of clinical trials for cancer. In the first part of the talk, he presents a system to make personalized lifestyle and health decisions for diabetes management, as well as for general health and diet management. (Joint work with Allison O' Hair.) In the second part of the talk, he proposes an analytics approach for the analysis and design of clinical trials that provides insights into what is the best currently available drug combination to treat a particular form of cancer and how to design new clinical trials that can discover improved drug combinations. The team develops semi-automated extraction techniques to build a comprehensive database of data from clinical trials. They use this database to develop statistical models from earlier trials that are capable of predicting the survival and toxicity of the combination of the drugs used, when the drugs used have been seen in earlier trials, but in different combinations. Then, using these statistical models, they develop optimization models that select novel treatment regimens that could be tested in clinical trials, based on the totality of data available on existing combinations. Ultimately, their approach offers promise for improving life expectancy and quality of life for cancer patients at low cost. (Joint work with Allison O' Hair, Stephen Relyea and John Silberholz).