Mathematics & Computer science in Life Sciences
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Nowadays, research in life sciences, including medicine, is simply impossible without the use of computational, mathematical and computer science / IT methods. To cope with the complexity of disease processes, interpret huge amounts of heterogeneous diagnostic data, predict drug effects and ultimately to improve existing and develop new therapeutic strategies, biologists and clinicians need support from other fields of science, including biomathematics, bioinformatics, and medical informatics.
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Systems medicine – Understanding disease causes and optimising therapies
Improved diagnostic methods, highly specialised therapeutic strategies as well as new insights from basic biology are basic building blocks of personalised medicine, i.e. the tailor-made patient-specific treatment. To use, integrate and correctly interpret all the available information, it is inevitable to combine the knowledge from many different disciplines. Systems medicine specifically provides computational and mathematical methods, which are used for example to analyse complex data structures or to simulate disease and/or treatment dynamics in the computer. Therefore, systems medicine considerably contributes to a more complete, systemic understanding of pathophysiological processes and to the development of new therapeutic options. At our institute, we are specifically concerned with the development and application of methods from the fields of data analysis (i.e. biometry and bioinformatics), data interpretation (i.e. mathematical modeling and computer simulation) and data management (i.e. medical informatics).
Find more information: Research areas