Visualizing Cancer Databases Using Hybrid Spaces

According to the World Health Organization(WHO), the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system http://www.who.int/ cancer/en/, from a total of 58 million deaths in 2005, cancer accounts for 7.6 million (or 13%) of all deaths worldwide. This places cancer as one of the leading causes of death in the world, with lung cancer (the main cancer leading to mortality) accounting for 1.3 million deaths per year. Thus the importance of understanding the mechanisms of lung cancer is clear. One approach is through the rapid quantification of the gene expression levels of samples of healthy and diseased lung tissue. This new field blending the knowledge from biologists, computer scientists and mathematicians is known as Bioinformatics and is yielding large quantities of data of a very high dimensional nature that needs to be understood.