Week 1

Content: The professors gave us a broad overview of the field and an interesting prelude to a very challenging field, which is still in its infancy. I definitely see the need for a merger of information technology with medicine in general, but I think that the skills needed for the same have not yet been well defined. Designing a course like the current one is definitely a necessary first step.
I have a background in medicine and epidemiology and had to acquire some technical skills to achieve the purpose of analysis required for making sense of my data. This was a daunting but rewarding task and process led to understand, store, interpret and manipulate my data efficiently.
I think that the field of biomedical informatics needs one to have sufficient working knowledge in the fields of medicine, statistics and technology with a mastery in atleast one.
Dr Dinu's lecture on EAV system was preemptive for me as I did not have a basic knowledge of database management system. The links posted by Dr Kahol on "Introduction to databases" was VERY HELPFUL. The paper by 'Dinu/Nadkarni' is also a very good resourse to understanding the difference between relational database and EAV and the very specific uses of EAV.
Dr Kahol had asked for an example where "computer technology had to become a little less understandable to become more efficient?". I was wondering if Artificial Intelligence can be one such example. Any thoughts??

Posted by Sheetal Shetty