Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
HIS
Hospital Information Systems
IMIA
International Medical Informatics Association
MI
Medical Informatics
NCI
National Cancer Institute
NIH
National Institutes of Health
NIOSH
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
NPO
NanoParticle Ontology
NSF
National Science Foundation
NT
Nanomedicine Taxonomy
ONAMI
Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute
PMID
PubMed Identifier
QM/MM
Quantum Mechanics and Molecular Mechanics
TM
Text Mining
UMLS
Unified Medical Language System
1
Introduction
Computers applications in biomedicine started appearing only a few years after the
first commercial computers came onto the market in the 1950s. Some physicians
and biologists soon realized that computers were suited scientific and professional
problem-solving, going beyond their first uses in financial and resource management.
In about a decade many medical applications, involving computerized medical
records, Hospital Information Systems (HIS), decision support systems, radiology
and departmental information systems had been developed. In biology, cell and
chromosome analysis was followed by work on DNA and RNA sequencing, data-
bases for storing genetic information, programs for molecular visualization and
simulation and much else besides.
Over the past 15 years, different informatics disciplines addressing various
biomedical subfields have led to various kinds of synergies emerging between them.
From different areas, originally labeled “medical informatics”, “bioinformatics”,
“systems biology”, “public health informatics”, “computational biology”, “clinical
informatics” and others a new broad and challenging field emerged in 1998-2000
(Altman
1998
; Maojo and Kulikowski
2003
), called “Biomedical Informatics”
(BMI). Scientific recognition has come from the many informatics challenges result-
ing from the very large, publicly available datasets generated as result of the Human
Genome and other—omics projects. Now, a new area termed “Nanoinformatics”
involves the analysis of information-related issues arising in nanomedicine and nano-
technology, and the research and development of new methods and tools at the bio-
medical nano-level. At the present time of writing, only six papers can be retrieved in
Medline by searching the term “nanoinformatics”―including papers published in
major journals (Maojo et al.
2010
); (De la Calle et al.
2009
; De la Iglesia et al.
2011
)―but a larger set of papers can be found searching with the terms “Nanotechnology
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