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6.5 years ago
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Hi everyone, this is my first question here. I wanted to know how much medical data a patient might have including his/her genomes, imaging data etc. And what are the different sizes / capacities involved. And also what is the size of the data when it is passed to the patient? All answers are appreciated.
This is such a vague/broad question that there is likely no logical answer. Let us say 3 GB for "assembled" whole genome sequence and then keep adding whatever else you have to the list. Note: I have no idea what an imaging scan takes up in terms of space.
As genomax says, this is a vague question, but likely to spark a good topic of discussion.
The biggest files that I have come across so far in my career have been whole genome phased sequencing from a single individual. The raw reads came to around 70 gigabytes. This is plain text data. The file containing the list of variants called in this phased genome sample alone came to 2 gigabytes in size.
An interesting extension of your question, though, is that researchers in physics, chemistry, and things like astronomy/cosmology have long been generating large amounts of data. Now that we're also doing the same in the biological sciences, we're 'porting' many of the methods originally developed for use in these other fields in order to analyse our data. I worked once as a quantum chemist and the type of complex calculations that I had to do back then I've never had to repeat as a bioinformatician.
I find this infographic from Nature always interesting, even though it is a few years old at this point.