University of Utah PS-OP
The University of Utah team is developing new mathematical frameworks to do what no others currently can, that is, create a single coherent model from multiple high-dimensional datasets, known as tensors. The frameworks – comparative spectral decompositions – generalize those that underlie the theoretical description of the physical world. The team is using the frameworks to compare and contrast datasets recording different aspects of a single disease, such as genomic profiles of multiple cell types from the same set of patients, measured more than once by several different methods. By using the complex structure of the datasets, rather than simplifying them as is commonly done, the frameworks enable the separation of patterns of DNA alterations – which occur only in the tumor genomes – from those that occur in the genomes of normal cells in the body, and from variations caused by experimental inconsistencies. The patterns that the team uncovers in the data are expected to offer answers to the open question of the relation between a tumor's genome and a patient's outcome.
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