R. Atun, Y. Lussier, C. Poon, S. T. C. Wong, and G.-Z. Yang
Development in the fields of biomedical and health informatics are driving major expansion in big-data, not only because of the sheer volume of information generated, but also due to the complexity, diversity, and the rich context of the data that encompasses discoveries from basic sciences to clinical translation, to health systems and large-scale population studies on determinants of health. This general trend also brings socio-legal implications. New data analytic tools to facilitate scalable, accessible and sustainable data infrastructure for effective management of large, multiscale, multimodal, distributed and heterogeneous data sets and convert data into knowledge for support cost-effective decision aids, disease management, and care delivery need to be developed. In promoting big-data as a source of innovation in healthcare and accelerating the translational pathways from the laboratory bench to the patient’s bedside, this special issue includes a collection of papers addressing some of medical and health informatics challenges related to big data. Papers submitted cover a range of topics, from bioinformatics, imaging informatics, sensor informatics, medical informatics to public health informatics. They also include initiatives that enable use of big-data analytics in health systems for improved clinical decision making, enhanced efficiency of care provision, policy development and policy implementation.
Articles in this Special Issue
- Big data for health – Andreu Perez et al
- Big data, big knowledge: big data for personalised healthcare – Viceconti et al
- Predicting Days in Hospital Using Health Insurance Claims – Xie et al
- Predicting Asthma-Related Emergency Department Visits Using Big Data – Ram et al
- Hierarchical Classification of Large-Scale Patient Records for Automatic Treatment Stratification – Mei et al
- We Feel: Mapping emotion on Twitter – Larsen et al
- Symmetrical Compression Distance for Arrhythmia Discrimination in Cloud-based Big Data Services – Lillo-Castellano et al
- Optimal Drug Prediction from Personal Genomics Profiles – Sheng et al
- Toward Non-invasive Quantification of Brain Radioligand Binding by Combining Electronic Health Records and Dynamic PET Imaging Data – Mikhno et al
- Big Heart Data: Advancing Health Informatics through Data Sharing in Cardiovascular Imaging – Suinesiaputra et al