Medical Test Data on Wolfram|Alpha

by Bertalan Meskó

Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 01:15 AM EST

Scienceroll.com readers know well I’m an admirer of WolframAlpha:

I use WolframAlpha because sometimes (if I know exactly what I want to find) it saves me plenty of time and clicks. If I want to calculate BMI, Google lists me several calculators. WolframAlpha calculates it itself. If I want to find information very fast about a clinical marker, Google gives me resources, WA gives me the best answer in one click. I also use it for ICD classification, as it’s more easily accessible than Wikipedia; for epidemiological data and other calculations.

To sum it up, I think WolframAlpha is for those who perfectly know what they want to find and want to save time and clicks. For other search queries, Google is still the best.

Now the Wolfram Alpha Team released a guide about how this unique search engine can be used for analyzing medical test-related data.

You can fine-tune the results even more by adding additional personal attributes. For example, entering “cholesterol tests age 65” filters the general population distribution to return only values from individuals 60–70 years old.

By adding more filters such as smoking status, diabetic status, pregnancy status, and other individual characteristics, you can find out more about how your test results compare to other populations covered by NHANES.

This article originally appeared on ScienceRoll.