In a remarkable example of interdisciplinary teamwork, astronomers are helping cancer researchers use computerized stargazing algorithms developed for spotting distant galaxies to identify biomarkers in tumors to determine how aggressive they are. The teams, from Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, and the Department of Oncology and the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in the UK, describe how they adapted the astronomers’ image analysis algorithms and tested them on 2,000 breast tumors in a study published online on 19 February in the British Journal of Cancer.
