Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
new nano-ontologies or creating new standards for storing information. NanoHub
or caNanolab are interesting examples of extended repositories of different infor-
mation and tools.
4.4
Linking Nano-Information to Computerized
Medical Records
Since the creation of computerized medical records, standardization of their infor-
mational contents has been a key issue in their development. Since the turn of the
century, a new challenge has been the introduction of genomic information. In this
context, linking genotypic and phenotypic information is still a topic of research.
For nanomedicine, toxicity will play a critical role, which must be introduced into
computerized medical records. There are already various databases of toxic
effects such as NIOSH's (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health,
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ ) and ONAMI's toxicity analysis (Oregon Nanoscience
and Microtechnologies Institute, http://www.greennano.org ). Researchers can
address new nanoinformatics methods to model and simulate nanotoxicity pro-
cesses, linking them with actual patient data from computerized medical records to
predict human response. In Europe and the USA some recent initiatives—like
ACGT (Anguita et al. 2008 ) and caBIG (McCusker et al. 2009 )—have already car-
ried out research to develop new approaches to data acquistion, exchange, modeling
and simulation of nano-related issues such as drug delivery. They use Grid-based
infrastructures to facilitate high performance computing of complex processes like
simulation. They propose to optimize clinico-genomic trials, enhancing at the same
time other issues like testing drug efficacy and preventive care. By using advanced
computational methods, researchers can reduce the time needed to develop and
evaluate drugs—nanoparticles, in nanomedicine—, which introduce different
requirements, leading to “nano-clinical” trials—from the lab to clinical practice.
4.5
Nanoinformatics Education
Training in nano-related topics has been, until now, usually restricted to pro-
grammes mostly focused in the chemical and physical fields. In the future nanoin-
formatics training should be expanded to other areas―e.g. medicine, engineering,
computer science―to deal with numerous additional issues. In this regard, members
of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) have developed new
guidelines for nano-related education (Mantas et al. 2010 ). New academic pro-
grammes can be designed or new sections of established programmes—e.g. in BMI
or medicine—can be modified by introducing nano-related topics and areas.
Education in the new field of Nanoinformatics reminds one of the original
problems faced by BMI years ago (early1990s), when traditional programs had to
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