Content:
Week 1:

Lecture 1:

The first lecture was all about the introduction to the course. The class was started giving the course description about what biomedical informatics method is. Following that, objective of the course was mentioned and then the summary of the things that are going to be covered in this course, and finally the term project assignment.

Lecture 2:

Dr. Dinu gave the guest lecture on EAV (entity-attribute-value) modeling from biomedical databases. The lecture covered the basic concept of database, approaches of storing and using data from database. Why we need EAV model was covered next followed by its requirement and uses. as its requirement, and its uses. We also studied the physical and the logical schema, metadata, pivoting EAV data. Examples of conventional clinical data and EAV clinical data helped to understand the difference between the two (former one stores attributes as a separate column and each row thus becomes a set of facts; whereas using EAV helps to store a single fact in a row. (ref: nadkarni)).

By "entity", we mean real world objects, that can be a computer, a patient or a student. Each entity has some
features, or properties, which define them. For example, a computer's features may be its brand, date of purchase, price, warranty period etc. Similarly if a person has features like high temperature, high glucose level, then we assume that the person is a patient. These features, which help to define an entity, are called "attributes".

In slides 16 and 17, definition of primary key is repeated. I believe that should be only in slide 17. A "primary-key" is used to uniquely identify an entity. And it can be mistakenly understood as an "entity". However, a"primary-key" is not an entity, it is also an attribute. For example, a student has an ID. If we know his/her ID, we can obtain his information from the database. We don't really need his name to do that (we used his ID as his name). But, that particular ID defines a particular student. Hence, student's ID is an attribute.

I refer this site (http://www.thocp.net/software/software_reference/databases.htm) to understand why we need databases. Why not conventional file systems (like Excel sheets).

Posted by

Prabal