Clinical bioinformatics.
Clinical bioinformatics provides biological and medical information to allow for individualized healthcare. In this review, we describe the uses of clinical bioinformatics. After the analysis of the complete human genome sequences, clinical bioinformatics enables researchers to search online biological databases and use the biological information in their medical practices. The data obtained from using microarray is extremely complicated. In clinical bioinformatics, selecting appropriate software to analyze the microarray data for medical decision making is crucial. Proteomics strategy tools usually focus on similarity searches, structure prediction, and protein modeling. In clinical bioinformatics, the proteomic data only have meaning if they are integrated with clinical data. In pharmacogenomics, clinical bioinformatics includes elaborate studies of bioinformatics tools and various facets of proteomics related to drug target identification and clinical validation. Using clinical bioinformatics, researchers apply computational and high-throughput experimental techniques to cancer research and systems biology. Meanwhile, researchers of bioinformatics and medical information have incorporated clinical bioinformatics to improve health care, using biological and medical information. Using the high volume of biological information from clinical bioinformatics will contribute to changes in practice standards in the healthcare system. We believe that clinical bioinformatics provides benefits of improving healthcare, disease prevention and health maintenance as we move toward the era of personalized medicine.
Chang
Phei Lang
PL
Division of Urology, Department of Surgery and Bioinformatics Center, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan. henryc@cgmh.org.tw
D019295:Computational Biology; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D030562:Databases, Protein; D023281:Genomics; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D010597:Pharmacogenetics; D040901:Proteomics