Brazilian researchers have created an innovative and agile computational tool to link and analyze different health databases with millions of patient records. Called Tucuxi-BLAST, the platform encodes identification records in a database, such as patient name, mother’s name and place of birth, using letters that represent the nucleotides in a DNA sequence (A, T, C or G). This “conversion” of individuals to DNA enables accurate record linkage across databases despite typographical errors and other inconsistencies.
Computational tool uses DNA-encoded approach to integrate and analyze different health databases
