Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1
An analysis of the papers published and available in Medline, indexed with the term
“Nanotechnology informatics”. On the left, a summary of the publication sources; on the right,
top keyword terms included in those papers. Search carried out by using GoPubMed (
http://www.
gopubmed.org/
)
Informatics”. Figure
1
shows an analysis, carried out with GoPubMed (
http://www.
gopubmed.org/
), of different results from such a search, including the year of publica-
tion and the areas covered. However, we use the term “Nanoinformatics” here, since
we believe that it might result in greater long-term acceptance. In fact, the three main
conferences held or planned at the time of writing—in 2007, 2008 and 2010—included
the term “Nanoinformatics” in their titles.
Nanoinformatics refers “to the use of informatics techniques for analyzing and
processing information about the structure and physicochemical characteristics of
nanoparticles, their environments, and applications” (Maojo et al.
2010
). It incor-
porates, under its umbrella, concepts from areas such as informatics (computer
science and information technologies), nanotechnology, medicine and other tradi-
tional disciplines such as biology, chemistry and physics. Two preliminary White
Papers, written by researchers with support from the NCI (Baker et al.
2009
) and
the EC (
http://www.action-grid.eu
), are already available for reference. The authors
actively participated in writing the second one. These and other pioneering initia-
tives have helped launch Nanoinformatics as a novel discipline designed to accelerate
the different research and development directions in nanomedicine and propose
new challenges and a roadmap for the field.
In the following we give a brief overview of a discipline which is still at an early
stage, barely beyond its inception. First, we summarize various nanomedical topics
where informatics methods and tools can be effectively applied. Second, we list
and discuss a range of emerging and challenging Nanoinformatics topics. Finally,
we describe text-mining based research on Nanoinformatics developed by the
authors—a first in the literature.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search