Most people would struggle to make a link between data processing and saving the lives of children with leukaemia, but computational tools being developed by a UTS PhD student could make a big difference for doctors treating young cancer patients.

Ahmad Aloqaily is part of a Faculty of Information Technology team working on methods to crunch data for the Oncology Research Unit at The Children's Hospital at Westmead to help identify patients at risk of relapse.

The research, which has just been awarded an Australian Rotary Health Research Fund PhD scholarship, is working towards a visual representation of vast amounts of DNA data that will assist doctors and medical researchers in identifying significant patterns.

Mr Aloqaily, who is supervised by Dr Paul Kennedy and Professor Simeon Simoff at UTS and Dr Daniel Catchpoole at The Children's Hospital, said the possibility of relapse was now considered the major obstacle to survival for children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, or ALL.

"Improved survival of children with ALL is one of the great success stories of paediatric medicine – nearly 80 per cent respond to the initial clinical intervention – but if the condition recurs the likelihood for cure is poor," Mr Aloqaily said.

"There is a need to reliably identify childhood leukaemia patients at greater risk of not responding to current treatment, who can then undergo modified therapy.

"The computational tools we are developing will allow doctors and researchers to examine the genetic background of patients to identify those who have a high chance of relapse, to learn why and to help choose treatment strategies which best suit each individual.

"Specifically, this project will focus on data describing the genetic background of over 100 childhood ALL patients. This will be the basis for building a computer software suite which will assist clinicians at the point of care with the diagnosis and clinical management of individual ALL patients."

Dr Kennedy said Mr Aloqaily's project flowed from nearly three years of collaboration between IT experts at UTS and the hospital's medical researchers to find new ways of dealing with complex biomedical data.

"What we want to produce is the big picture – a holistic view that will reveal global patterns in a data set made up of very large individual data files: clinical, gene expression and others," Dr Kennedy said.

Mr Aloqaily has been awarded $75,000 over three years for the project, jointly funded by the Australian Rotary Health Research Fund (ARHRF), Rotary District 9680 and the UTS Faculty of IT.

The ARHRF is one of the largest independent medical research funds in Australia – a multi-district project for Rotary in Australia, with over 1,200 Rotary clubs and 40,000 Rotarians supporting it. Rotary District 9680 covers Sydney's northern suburbs and the Central Coast.