Summary
Background: Medical informatics has always encompassed a very broad spectrum of techniques for
clinical and biomedical research, education and practice. There has been a concomitant
variety of depth of specialization, ranging from the routine application of information
processing methods to cutting-edge research on fundamental problems of computer-based
systems and their relations to cognition and perception in biomedicine.
Objectives: Challenges for the field can be placed in perspective by considering the scale of
each – from the highly detailed scientific problems in bioinformatics and emerging
molecular medicine to the broad and complex social problems of introducing medical
informatics into web-related global settings. Methods: The scale of an informatics problem is not only determined by the inherent physical
space in which it exists, but also by the conceptual complexity that it involves,
reinforcing the need to investigate the semantic web within which medical informatics
is defined.
Results and Conclusion: Bioinformatics, biomedical imaging and language understanding provide examples that
anchor research and practice in biomedical informatics at the detailed, scientific
end of the spectrum. Traditional concerns of medical informatics in the clinical arena
make up the broad mid-range of the spectrum, while novel social interaction models
of competition and cooperation will be needed to understand the implications of distributed
health information technology for individual and societal change in an increasingly
interconnected world.
Keywords
Medical informatics - bioinformatics - biomedical imaging - languages - ontologies
