SYMBiomatics: Synergies in Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics – exploring current scientific literature for emergine topics

摘要

Background: The SYMBIOmatics Specific Support Action (SSA) is "an information gathering and disseminationactivity" that seeks "to identify synergies between the bioinformatics and the medical informatics" domain toimprove collaborative progress between both domains (ref. to http://www.symbiomatics.org). As part of theproject experts in both research fields will be identified and approached through a survey. To provide input tothe survey, the scientific literature was analysed to extract topics relevant to both medical informatics andbioinformatics.Results: This paper presents results of a systematic analysis of the scientific literature from medical informaticsresearch and bioinformatics research. In the analysis pairs of words (bigrams) from the leading bioinformatics andmedical informatics journals have been used as indication of existing and emerging technologies and topics overthe period 2000–2005 ("recent") and 1990–1990 ("past"). We identified emerging topics that were equallyimportant to bioinformatics and medical informatics in recent years such as microarray experiments, ontologies,open source, text mining and support vector machines. Emerging topics that evolved only in bioinformatics weresystem biology, protein interaction networks and statistical methods for microarray analyses, whereas emergingtopics in medical informatics were grid technology and tissue microarrays.Conclusion: We conclude that although both fields have their own specific domains of interest, they sharecommon technological developments that tend to be initiated by new developments in biotechnology andcomputer science.