Mathematics may help in 'profiling'.

• Position: Cancer Cells

A mathematician is finding ways to tell the difference between healthy cells and abnormal cells, such as cancer cells, based on the way they look and move. He is creating equations that describe the shape and motion of single cells for laboratory analysis.

Though this research is in its early stages, it represents an entirely new way of identifying cell abnormalities, including cancer. It one day could be useful in gauging future stages of a disease--for example, by detecting whether cells are aggressive and likely to spread throughout the body, or metastasize.

In a paper published in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Huseyin Coskun describes a mathematical model which analyzes image sequences of single, live cells to determine abnormalities manifested in their shape and behavior. A brain tumor cell was one of the cell types he analyzed in the study. Because the technique would allow doctors to view how cancer cells behave under various physical or chemical conditions, it also could be used to test different treatment strategies for each individual patient--such as determining the most efficient dose of chemotherapeutic agents or radiation--or even to test entirely new treatments.

In a very basic sense, diagnosing a "sick" cell such as a cancer cell by its...