The Era of Big Data: From Data-Driven Research to Data-Driven Clinical Care

Abstract

When the era of big data arrived in the early nineteen nineties, biomedical research boosted new innovations, procedures and methods aiding in clinical care and patient management. This chapter provides an introduction to the basic concepts and strategies of data-driven biomedical research and application, an area that is explained using terms such as computational biomedicine or clinical/medical bioinformatics. After a brief motivation it starts with a survey on data sources and bioanalytic technologies for high-throughput data generation, a selection of experimental study designs and their applications, procedures and recommendations on how to handle data quality and privacy, followed by a discussion on basic data warehouse concepts utilized for life science data integration, data mining and knowledge discovery. Finally, five application examples are briefly delineated, emphazising the benefit and power of computational methods and tools in this field. The author trusts that this chapter will encourage the reader to handle and interpret the huge amount of data usually generated in research projects or clinical routine to exploit mined bioinformation and medical knowledge for individualized health care.