Chapter 14 – Medical Informatics

Publisher Summary Medical informatics has three areas specific to medical and health care management, research, and delivery. These three general areas are shown as things related to a patient/doctor relationship like prescriptions and records, involving the accumulation of considerable data; the area of three-dimensional imaging like PET and MRI scanning and all the image processing data; and medical literature review and compilation. All three areas involve the accumulation of large amounts of data, and thus the possibility/need of analyzing these data to learn how to be more efficient and more accurate in management and diagnosis. Medical informatics data are structured, factual, numeric, and historical. These data contain textual data referred to as “unstructured,” in that they do not consist of numbers or codes that can be contained in a database. Knowledge gathered from both data mining and text mining methods is needed to formulate new hypotheses and provides the foundation for making decisions and taking action. Three-dimensional medical informatics is the application of data analysis to images, volume data, and other dimensional data in addition to text-based metadata associated with imaging. Medical storage repositories are filling rapidly with the type of information, such as nonprint data in the form of audio recordings, films of X-rays and 3D imaging, and video recordings.