Informatics Books

The science, or perhaps art, of data mining has received a lot of notice in the business world as ways to do specialized marketing to previous customers. In this book editors Wong (Harvard Medical School) and Li (IBM) have collected a series of chapters on the application of data mining techniques in the field of life sciences.

The particular applications showing promise include:

bio-surveillance
disease outbreak detection
high throughput bioimaging
drug screening
preidtive toxicology
biosensors
and more.

This is a brand new field offering some tremendous opportunities to provide for finding breakthroughs in the identification of problem areas within the normal data being collected for other reasons. This book is the first to discuss this cutting edge technology, still in the formative stages, but rapidly moving into the main stream.

This is a very good text book if you are thinking about implementing any new information systems in your hospital may be you can go through this text book. You can choose any of the chapters according to your requirement and read them. There are very good chapters especially in how to convince the management about the need for implementation of advanced IT systems, systematic thinking about the IT systems, how to manage organizational concerns and user resistance with respect to IT, understanding social impacts and more important how to manage security and information privacy in health care. Each chapter starts with a fictional case study later there will some questions related to that, which you can answer to get very good insight into the case study and incites interest in you to further concentrate on the rest of the chapter. After which there will be some Commentary and Reading. Under Reading there are very good articles related to that particular chapter. Overall it is a very good text book for health informatics professionals.

I am in grad school and this is one of my required texts. I will say that after having had it for a couple of months now, the information is relevant to the class and easy to read. The price for all my textbooks were better on Amazon. I just searched using the ISBN number to make sure I had the right one.

This second edition of Shortliffe's textbook is an excellent overview of the field. Although I used it as a course text, it is extremely readable. The chapters are not overly technical, as befits an introductory text, but by no means is this a "Dummmies" book either.

There are now a variety of introductory/overview books on medical informatics. However, of the ones I've read (including van Bemmel's Handbook of Medical Informatics and Coiera's Guide to Medical Informatics), this book is by far the best.

Excellent book. I had multiple talls to give and didn't want them to all look the same. I feel this gave me a real professional edge.

I reviewed an early draft of this book for the publisher, for which I received no compensation. I was interested to see whether the author responded to some of my suggestions. He did.

The book begins with a preface, which compares biomedical professionals of the 1970s, who couldn't touch-type, against biomedical professionals today, who lack computer programming skills. In the modern biomedical world, every biomedical professional should be able to do some computer programming. It's not enough to leave this skill to information technology professionals, just as keyboard typing is no longer left to clerks. If you are responsible for a large biomedical database, then you must be able to explore it yourself, both to get a first-hand overview of the data, and to better understand how to benefit from the information technologists with whom you work.

Three computer languages satisfy the minimum requirements for biomedical programming: Perl, Python, and Ruby. These languages are: free; fast; and easy to learn. Each provides a large user community; easy environment for correcting errors; large, available library of specialized modules; built-in pattern recognition commands; and yet are capable of large-scale data-analysis for advanced programmers. This list, enumerated by Dr. Berman and many others, should be chiseled in granite, published everywhere, and yelled from the rooftops. Greater compliance with this list would clear out much of the clutter in the chaotic world of biomedical informatics.

"Perl Programming for Medicine and Biology" covers all the areas of major interest to biomedical researchers, clinical scientists, and healthcare students: (1) how to download a cost-free copy of Perl for personal use; (2) simple Perl programs and troubleshooting; (3) file conversions; (4) file reading, one line at-a-time; (5) pattern-matching; (6) assigning data-arrays; (7) building an index; (8) regular expressions (regex); (9) biomedical nomenclatures; (10) searching and sorting; (11) data management; (12) internet and network protocols and data transfer; (13) cryptography, privacy, and data-scrubbing; and (14) related metadata languages (HTML, XML and RDF). For each data analysis area, the book includes sample problems that are accompanied by complete explanations, and by Perl source code that the reader can copy into his/her own computer and try out. The book makes generous use of publicly available datasets and other resources in these examples, so that the reader can perform his/her own computing experiments on data of genuine biomedical interest.

Several features of this book are particularly valuable for the busy professional reader. First, every chapter begins with a Background section, so that the reader gets an immediate overview of the material to be covered. These Background sections are inviting and insightful: why should the average biomedical professional care about a particular area, and what tasks can be carried out in Perl? Second, the Glossary is one of the highlights of the book. The glossary is reminiscent of Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, or Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary: included for each term is both a solid definition of what it is, and a personal opinion of why one should know or care about the term. Third, the Reference section isn't just a list of citations; each reference is accompanied by a useful commentary. Finally, the Resource section lists copious on-line resources available to the reader for further, in-depth study.

Some impatient readers, like myself, read the beginnings of a few chapters in a technical book, and then go quickly to the last chapter of the book, to see where it all ends, and whether it seems worthwhile to slog through the whole thing. Such readers are in for a pleasant surprise: the background sections, glossary, and references are reasonably comprehensive, and separate the wheat from the chaff among concepts in Information Technology. You can get a good overview of the whole book in a few hours.

The book is written in a breezy style that cuts through all the usual verbal chatter of more academic publications. This is an easy book to pick up and start reading, and hard to put down.

The publication of this book has been highly anticipated by many in the emerging field of public health informatics and it does not disappoint. Although seemingly targeted at those new or recently introduced to the discipline, or those "crossing over" from other areas within the broader informatics arena, content is very well-suited for all comers, with sufficient detail to satisfy even those familiar with the many issues detailed in the richly detailed case example chapters.

The breadth of material covered is excellent, making it especially appropriate as an introductory or intermediate text. Of particular interest will be the section of the book on "The Science of Public Health Informatics" which includes particularly fine chapters on information architecture, value assessment, management of personnel and projects, and organizational change. Bill Yasnoff does a particularly good job adding clarity to a muddled domain in a chapter on privacy, confidentiality, and security of Public Health Information. Those readers generally interested in PHI education, or with specific interest in developing training programs for PHI programs or for public health agency personnel would find great value in Janise Richard's chapter on core competencies.

The writing style is generally clear and illustrative, albeit not terribly concise. We have adopted this book as the core text for our graduate-level introductory course in PHI.

The editors, Y. Manolopoulos, A. N. Papadopoulos, and M. Gr. Vassilakopoulos have done a great job on collecting and forming together in an edited book thirteen state-of-the-art articles from well-known researchers in spatial databases. I really enjoyed reading "Spatial Databases".

Talk about "life and death" importance! Since the 1980's, the staff at the Johns Hopkins Cancer Institute have relied upon OCIS, an application written in the Tedium software development environment to accurately track patient information for thousands of patients.

Tedium is based on a completely different paradigm from anything you may have read about in the mainstream computer press. No GUI. No long filenames. Not object oriented. Not SQL compliant. No indented pretty code. No flowcharts. It uses goto statements!

Tedium is based on a paradigm called "software sculpture" and it occupies the area where the application domain and the user domain intersect.

It's 90 degrees from anything else you've ever read about and it's saving lives. You need to read this

The book is an excellent overview of all subjects involved in Health Informatics and is focused mainly to nursing students and postgraduates. Due to the generality of the contents, the book is also appropriate to most students studying the subject in Medical Schools.
The textbook is well-organised and all authors are well known in the international literature in the field of Health and Medical Informatics.
I suggest it for bying without hesitation.