R-Lab#5: the report & R-Lab#6 ready to go!

Hello, everyone!
We are ready to host the new R-Lab#6, the 19th of March! Since its goals are strictly connected to the past R-Lab ˗ but there’s also exciting news that we'll introduce at the end of the piece, so stay focused ˗ I thought you’d want to know how it went.

This time, we talked about personalized medicine using R. The event was sold-out; if fact, the whole room was full of smart and passionate people! It was so fun and interesting and I can’t thank you all enough. I’m here to keep up-to-date everyone who couldn’t be there and to refresh the memories of those who participated.

As the event started, Riccardo Rossi – computational biologist and bioinformatics facility manager at INGM (Istituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare) in Milan – explained to the audience the meaning of “personalized medicine”. He also explained the benefits of automatically calculating the risks of some illnesses using personal data such as height, weight, age but also more medical data such as blood pressure.

Medical guidelines, given and used by the World Health Organization, already exist to assess risks of obesity, type two diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular health; our goal was to turn them into a web-app which everyone could easily get access to.

During the second part of the event, Andrea Melloncelli explained why it was convenient to turn these algorithms into R functions and how to do it. After this brief theoretical part, we divided into five groups: one for each algorithm plus a special one working with the Shiny app.

The work is going really well, but the app still isn’t finished, so don’t miss our sixth R-Lab, where we will complete it and make it public. We are also introducing a new technique to improve our coding skills: the Test First Development! You can find all the information about TFD andthe event in general, plus registration, here. In the meantime, you can look at the full explanation of this past event in our official Meetup (which is also the best way to keep updated about RLabs and meetings) and all the materials, such as presentations and data, on GitHub.
Thank you as always for your support and participation!