Dr. Michael Schneider, a clinical geneticist at Springfield’s Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, wants to help doctors diagnose inherited conditions with an online database that improves upon the online search engines currently available to physicians.
Schneider, 51, is five months into the effort to create what he has called Wikiphen. He is collaborating with Sae Hwang, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Springfield.
“Wiki” refers to what he hopes will be a “collaborative, community effort” that links doctors and scientists across the world, and “phen,” referring to “phenotype,” or the physical characteristics a person develops from a combination of his or her genes and environmental factors.
Hwang’s collaboration was featured in a June 6, 2010, article in The State Journal-Register.
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