International debut for Australian-developed research tool

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 10:42

IT Industry - Development

A new research tool designed to increase the accuracy for determining the link between a person’s occupation and their risks of getting cancer, has been showcased to an international health research conference in the United States by a Queensland company which developed the software.

Data Scientists, a company specialising in the development of IT solutions for researchers, launched its new open source software solution - developed at the Innovation Centre on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast - to the 42nd annual meeting of the Society of Epidemiological Research (SER) in Los Angeles.

Data Scientists’ managing director, Troy Sadkowsky, said that previously to determine the likelihood that a person has been exposed to a hazardous environment, an epidemiology expert would have had to individually read through each questionnaire response.

Sadkowsky  said that with the new tool – OccIDEAS - the researcher can set rules in the system which automatically analyse which participants of the study have possible exposure or not. He said experts attending the SER meeting were very impressed by the program and its potential applications.

“A number of researchers stated that the application would have been perfect for their recent study and they wished they could have heard about OccIDEAS sooner.”

OccIDEAS was developed by Data Scientists for the University of Western Australia, for the purpose of increasing the accuracy in determining links between a person’s occupation and the risk of getting cancer.

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