Biomedical informatics and translational medicine

Biomedical informatics involves a core set of methodologies that can provide a foundation for crossing the "translational barriers" associated with translational medicine. To this end, the fundamental aspects of biomedical informatics (e.g., bioinformatics, imaging informatics, clinical informatics, and public health informatics) may be essential in helping improve the ability to bring basic research findings to the bedside, evaluate the efficacy of interventions across communities, and enable the assessment of the eventual impact of translational medicine innovations on health policies. Here, a brief description is provided for a selection of key biomedical informatics topics (Decision Support, Natural Language Processing, Standards, Information Retrieval, and Electronic Health Records) and their relevance to translational medicine. Based on contributions and advancements in each of these topic areas, the article proposes that biomedical informatics practitioners ("biomedical informaticians") can be essential members of translational medicine teams

Multiscale representation for automatic identification of structures in medical images

The identification of structures is a key step in several applications of medical imaging. In this work we propose a method for the identification of structures using a multiscale approach with inclusion of a priori information about the searched objects. After describing the image structures in the multiscale representation, a matching step determines which structure most likely corresponds to the target. Patterns are generated by previous application of the method to a set of images. We present a prototype for identifying structures in 2D images. A set of experiments was carried out to evaluate the prototype leading to encouraging results. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.3781183119