Clinical Bioinformatics: Challenges and Opportunities

Background: Network Tools and Applications in Biology (NETTAB) Workshops are a series of meetings focused on the most promising and innovative ICT tools and to their usefulness in Bioinformatics. The NETTAB 2011 workshop, held in Pavia, Italy, in October 2011 was aimed at presenting some of the most relevant methods, tools and infrastructures that are nowadays available for Clinical Bioinformatics (CBI), the research field that deals with clinical applications of bioinformatics. Methods In this editorial, the viewpoints and opinions of three world CBI leaders, who have been invited to participate in a panel discussion of the NETTAB workshop on the next challenges and future opportunities of this field, are reported. These include the development of data warehouses and ICT infrastructures for data sharing, the definition of standards for sharing phenotypic data and the implementation of novel tools to implement efficient search computing solutions. Results: Some of the most important design features of a CBI-ICT infrastructure are presented, including data warehousing, modularity and flexibility, open-source development, semantic interoperability, integrated search and retrieval of -omics information. Conclusions: Clinical Bioinformatics goals are ambitious. Many factors, including the availability of high-throughput "-omics" technologies and equipment, the widespread availability of clinical data warehouses and the noteworthy increase in data storage and computational power of the most recent ICT systems, justify research and efforts in this domain, which promises to be a crucial leveraging factor for biomedical research

EFMI Working Group on Translational Health Informatics \u2013 Workshop on How Informatics Can Mitagte Traslational Medicine Barriers

Translational medicine is a relatively new discipline targeted at removing barriers in utilizing new scientific discoveries in healthcare, moving from bench to bedside, on to communities and finally to policy. The biomedical discoveries need to be accompanied by studies in areas such as health economy as well as sociological and psychological aspects. In order to manage the information generated by each of these disciplines, it is crucial to use advanced informatics that could fuse the various types of data into computerized systems that support the translational processes. This workshop aims at discussing these challenges