Genomic Signal Processing [Life Sciences]

Signal processing has played a major auxiliary role in medicine via the array of technologies available to physicians. Only a rapidly diminishing proportion of the population can recall medicine without computer tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and ultrasound. In this capacity, signal processing serves only a supporting function. The future will be different. Like a factory, regulatory logic defines the cell as an operational system [1]: The roles of regulatory logic in the factory (or complex machine) and the cell are congruent because the key to the characterization of this logic lies in communication (between components) and control (of components)that is, in systems theory, which therefore determines the epistemology of the cell. Ipso facto, the mathematical foundations of biology, and therefore its translational partner, medicine, reside in the mathematics of systems theory. Hence, the roles of signal processing and the closely related theories of communication, control, and information will play constitutive functions as medicine evolves into a translational science resting on a theoretical framework.