Week 1

Content:

Hello.  The first class of this semester I choose project 3:  Coordinated Large Scale Testing and Evaluation of Medical Devices.  I chose this project because I have a bioengineering background.  I am really excited to learn how to use biomedical informatics methods and apply them to medical device testing.  I am a bit familiar with overall device testing.  Some considerations for the project would be the end users needs and wants.  I am also brainstorming into cost-efficiency and market strategies.  I am sure this type of information processing will not only be helpful for device testing, but also in the development new innovative medical devices.  I am looking forward to working with my peers in this project. 

A presentation on entity attribute value modeling for biomedical databases was given on August 26, by Dr. Dinu.  This was a great introduction presentations and I thought it was very interesting.  I really have no background in databases, except for using Access a couple of times, so this presentation was very informative.

First, Dr. Dinu compared EAV to conventional databases.  He also gave a brief explanation on when it was more efficient to use conventional databases.  Thereafter, the EAV database was explained in more detail, and how it is being used in clinical data.  Some challenges with EAV databases are efficiency, data extraction and vocabulary standards.

I was very interesting in knowing how much more efficient conventional databases are compared to EAV.  I read an article that stated that depending on the query it was range from 3-5 times faster.  A cost effective solution to making EAV queries faster would be purchasing a faster computer. 

Source: Roland, C. S., Nadkarni, P., Marenco, L., Levin, F., Erdos, J., & Miller, P. L. (2000). Exploring Performance Issues for Clinical Databases Organized Using an Entity-Attribute-Value Representation. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association , 7, 475-487.

Posted by Pierina Ortiz